In “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” the triumphantly postmodern satirical biopic about MTV’s era’s favorite crooner, Al (Daniel Radcliffe), weird but not yet “Weird,” is sitting with his roommates when lightning strikes — or , at least, Bologna. One of the housemates asks Al to name the thing he would most like to do in the world. Al, speaking with more fervor than mere desire—he’s not talking about a dream—replies, with stoic conviction: “Make the words to a song that already exists.” Moments later, the Knack’s “My Sharona” comes on the radio, and as soon as he pulls a package of bologna out of the fridge, he has his a-ha moment. The lyrics come to him in a flash: “Oh my hungry little one! Hungry! Open a pack of MY bologna…” An irresistible parasitic fake star is born.
“Weird,” it turns out, isn’t really a biopic. It’s a film that does to the biopic what Weird Al did to songs like “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Beat It” — imitates it, destroys it, muddies it, subverts it. And all this with supreme affection. Almost nothing in the film actually happened, except for the parodies of the songs. Everything is relentlessly over-the-top and over-the-top — Weird Al aga turned into a circus version of himself. However, the movie has the spirit of one of the “Naked Gun” movies. He’s enamored with pop culture and in love with the tropes he parodies — he pokes fun at himself with such gleeful dedication that there’s something delusional yet honest about his authenticity. Part of Weird Al’s joke was that the comedy of his song had a knowingly overly obvious side-pushing quality. “Weird,” equipping Weird Al’s iconic art with a virtual biopic, takes the ribbing to the third power. Which turns out to be a delightfully ticklish sensation.
The film, to its credit, salutes, skewers and fully understands the not just silly, but scandalous nature of ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s celebrity. Starting in the early 80s, he was a geek who connected with famous Top 40 singles and, by recreating the songs but replacing the most awful lyrics, made those songs seem reborn as wonderfully dumb imitations of themselves . Weird Al’s songs were called parodies, but using that word is almost an elevation of what he did. He would take famous paintings and draw mustaches on them, mocking them with the broad brush of Mad magazine, crossed with the exuberance of a second grader singing “Jingle bells, Batman smells.” He was taking pop songs and giving them nougat.
That the songs, in their silly new palm tree versions, became hits again was the joke behind the joke. By stripping the original lyrics but keeping the music’s charm, Weird Al (with apologies to the music critics) revealed something essential about how pop music works – that the lyrics in more pop songs than most would admit are basic showcase. Weird Al’s version of a song might be about driving the bus, making a sandwich, or loving Rocky Road ice cream, but the song sounded almost as catchy that way. The joke was on the original artists and us.
The secret to Weird Al’s success is that he may have been the first star of the YouTube/TikTok era — 30 years before these things were invented. Anyone today who did what Weird Al did in the 80s would be a viral sensation by now. And part of what we loved about Weird Al is the transparent fact that he had a kind of theatrics that didn’t really involve much talent. Many of the videos that make it big on YouTube or TikTok are, at heart, aspirational. for the viewer, they carry an “I want to be him” or “If I play my cards right, she could be me” dimension. And that very quality, decades before we started to amuse ourselves to death on social media, was made in the goofy glory of “Weird Al” Yankovic.
The film, directed by TV veteran Eric Appel from a script he co-wrote with Yankovic, doesn’t just satirize the clichés of the rise and fall of celebrity biopics, as “Walk Hard” did. he lives the clichés even as he mocks them. In this version of the story, Weird Al grows up in the 70s with parents who are hilariously neglectful in their refusal to approve of his achievements. His mother, played by Julianne Nicholson (who, post-Blonde, is cornering the market for oppressive moms), is a doomsayer, while his father (Toby Huss) is an angry factory worker who believes the Al has to come work at the factory — it’s a running joke that no one knows what the factory makes — and he treats his son’s dream like a flower he wants to crush. When an accordion salesman walks by, Nick blows him off, but not before Al is fixated on the massive hand-pumped organ keyboard as his instrument of salvation.
Al attends a high school polka party, which the film treats as a bacchanal, and auditions for a punk band with his accordion version of “Beat on the Brat.” But it’s only when he gets down to “My Bologna” that “Weird’s” comedic strategy kicks in. The movie will be about how Al became a huge star—hugeer than he really was, a megastar of the mishegas.
He ascends after connecting with Dr. Demento (Rain Wilson), the wacky neo-Carnite magician of a Los Angeles radio personality who is the first to play his songs. At a pool party at Dr. Demento’s house, Al proves himself to the world. The movie is full of juicy cameos — fun celebrities played, in some cases, by fun actors — and this amazing scene is an orgy of them. Look, it’s Pee-wee Herman! It’s Frank Zappa and Divine! It’s Conan O’Brien as Andy Warhol! And it’s John Deacon, Queen’s bassist (who, to his dismay, no one recognizes him), who inspires the full-on hipster DJ Wolfman Jack, played by Jack Black, to issue Al a challenge: If he’s that great , maybe he’s making a song parody on the spot? Under pressure, in front of everyone, he freely says “Another One Rides the Bus”.
Weird Al wasn’t a pop star, but he was a tall, lanky, and rather good-looking nerd who mocked his beauty by adorning it with wire-rimmed aviator glasses, a sardine mustache, the ugliest Hawaiian shirts he could find, and that mop of curls. He used this geek costume to modify himself the same way his lyrics modified the songs. It’s fitting, at first, to see Daniel Radcliffe play Al as a serious nerd. But one of the good jokes about “Weird” is the huge Hollywood biographical arc his persona undergoes. Radcliffe does it expertly. He starts out as a wallflower, then he turns into a guy who almost lives in the shadow of his success, then he embraces his celebrity, then he meets Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood), who becomes his girlfriend, so he starts to enter his own bloated phase head.
The key moment is built around the song “Eat It”. Al seems to think of it the same way he does his others, except now, in his egomania, he thinks it’s actually an original song. When Michael Jackson comes out with “Beat It,” Al—and the film—treats it like he’s been ripped off. But this occasionally surreal twist has a resonance. It’s Weird Al scathingly mocking his own absurdly uprooted art. It also fits nicely into the classic biopic plot: Al has to claim “originality” — to the point of insanity — because he’s so hurt by his dad’s rejection of him. “Weird” pokes fun at the way biopics turn into therapeutic soap operas. However, by the time Al heads to Colombia to rescue Madonna from Pablo Escobar, the film has pushed its hero’s rise to the point where he is now a drug action-thriller star, all of which Radcliffe plays with poker-faced charisma .
I can’t say that Evan Rachel Wood does the world’s best Madonna impersonation, but playing Madge in the mid-’80s, when she was first experiencing her superstardom, Wood amusingly tweaks Madonna’s connection to smaller interactions. for self-promotion. “Weird,” in its flippant way, turns into a riff on megalomania, as Weird Al has an episode of getting drunk and treating his teammates like crap, and then a Jim Morrison exposes himself. in the tent? episode. But there are limits to his belief in rock stars versus comedy. When he is told that the reunited Led Zeppelin want to open for him on tour, he is almost offended. He’s already lined up Howie Mandel!
“Weird” is witty and inventive enough to keep what could, in lesser hands, have been a one-joke, “SNL” riff movie for itself. The ultimate joke of the movie is that “Weird Al” Yankovic’s entire career was a joke — not just because he did such funny covers of other people’s songs, but because what he did made him a court jester. When he does “Amish Paradise”, performing it in concert, there is a shot of Coolio sitting in the audience looking completely pissed off. We laugh because we understand why. Weird Al did not create. he wasn’t even satirizing. But he thumbed his nose with abandon, reminding us all that just because a song has its brain removed doesn’t mean you can’t dance to it.
