Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

Daniel Radcliffe continues his post-juvenile career of unexpected and daring choices by starring as the titular "Weird Al,” who falls in love with the accordion as a kid and turns his nerdy persona and comically unsexy instrument into a hugely popular act. Right out of college he launches into a successful forty-year vocation lampooning the biggest hits of every decade and nearly every popular genre of music. The film chronicles the writing and recording of each of Al's early songs in the correct order, but aside from that, everything in the film is an intentionally broad fabrication. Even the real-life figures in Al's life, like his longtime bandmates and his mentor, the novelty radio broadcaster known as Dr. Demento (played here by a one-note Rainn Wilson) are exaggerated into consciously absurd biopic clichés. Around the turn into the film's second act, Al has gotten romantically involved with would-be superstar Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood), who leads him astray even though she's only interested in him because, by that point in his career, a parody recording by "Weird Al" can turn any song into a major hit.

But as effectively as the film captures the way a true story inevitably—often cynically and sometimes arbitrarily—gets fictionalized when turned into a biopic, that concept is not enough to sustain a feature film. By the time Al and Madonna get captured by agents of Pablo Escobar for the notorious Colombian drug lord's fortieth birthday party, both the conceit and the laughs have long since lost whatever spark was contained in the limited premise. What could have made the film successful is a surprising turn into something more honest and introspective in its second half, rather than just doubling down on the same idea and gags.

Yankovic’s best parody songs— “Eat It,” “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “Bedrock Anthem,” “Smells Like Nirvana,” “Fat,” “Bob,”  “Yoda,” “The Saga Begins”—are not only showcases for first-rate wordplay, they also offer up an incisive dissection of a musical genre, an artist or band’s persona, or a pop culture moment. His song “White & Nerdy” scrutinizes his own persona while its subtext addresses the issues with his caricatures of hip hop, funk, gangster rap, and other musical genres dominated by people of color. If Weird had even a touch of the subtext and analysis present in Al’s best musical work, it would be a more than worthwhile picture.

Instead, much of the satirical humor in Weird is as uninspired and cliché as the films it ridicules. For example, Toby Huss and Julianne Nicholson play Nick and Mary Yankovic who, in this telling, are Al's strict, disapproving parents who don't believe in his dreams of musical stardom. A lot of screen time is devoted to the idea that the bad faith and harsh actions of parents in biopics forever haunt the artistic souls of the protagonists and spur them onto creative success. This exhausted narrative trope is so succinctly and mercilessly mocked by Walk Hard I would have thought it'd be forever banished from all actual biopics from then on, let alone trotted out for another comedy film mocking the genre.

Weird started out as a fake trailer for the Funny or Die website. Al added that clip to the roster of videos that play at his concerts, which led to fans encouraging him to make the movie for real. And the picture feels like an expanded Funny or Die short in that the humor comes primarily from the concept and the casting rather than from sharp writing and directing. Epitomizing this much-too-common flaw in modern comedy is an early sequence where Al comes to an LA pool party at Dr. Demento's home attended by dozens of celebrities. It's a send-up of the scene in PT Anderson's Boogie Nights, in which Mark Wahlberg’s future porn star arrives at the home of Burt Reynolds’s porn film director and meets the community that he will soon become part of. Weird director Eric Appel doesn't even try to ape Anderson's iconic Steadicam shot—not that meticulously recreating something visual, as many more ambitious spoof directors do, constitutes actual comedy, but the effort would still be appreciated. This scene consists of nothing more than celebrities cameoing as other celebrities. The "fun" of the scene lies merely in seeing who is cast as whom rather than showcasing witty dialogue or making perceptive observations. Like most of this film, the scene is the comedy equivalent of a bowl of chocolate sprinkles with no ice-cream.