Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

"He is who is tired of Weird Al is tired of life" - Homer Simpson

Ask any kid in the Summer of 89 what their favorite movie was, and you would likely hear Tim Burton's original Batman as the answer.  If you were to ask 12-year-old me, I would have told you Weird Al's cinematic starring debut, UHF.  I have fond memories of my best friend at the time and I sitting in a vacant theater on opening night (the film was a bomb back in the day) laughing hysterically as my favorite musical comedy artist hit the big screen, and what I was certain would be a long and illustrious film career for the singer. (Okay, so I was terrible at predictions.  I was 12.)

33 years later comes Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which spoofs the musical biopic in a way that hasn't been attempted since 2007's Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.  Co-written by Al, and produced by the team at Funny or Die, the movie morphs his story into your standard biopic structure of fame leading to substance abuse, the troubled homelife with the disapproving parents, and the scandalous celebrity relationship that nearly upended everything he worked for, as well as the road back to the top.  But Al and his team don't stop there.  There's also a blood feud with Pablo Escobar worked into the story, and a climax at the 1985 Grammy Awards that I will let you discover for yourself.

Like a lot of biopics, the movie opens with the artist at his lowest point.  Here, a bloodied Weird Al (played here by Daniel Radcliffe, with Al himself providing the singing vocals) is at death's door while a desperate surgeon (Lin-Manuel Miranda, one of many cameos to be found) struggles to save his life.  We flash back to his early years, where a young Al (David Bloom) lives with his fretful mother (Julianne Nicholson) and verbally abusive one-handed father (Toby Huss) who works at a mysterious factory where nobody knows what they actually make (though they have a lot of accidents), and who chastises the boy for his love of the accordion and making up funny lyrics to popular songs.  After he is arrested by the police for attending a "Polka Party" with his friends, Al decides to set out on his own and make a name for himself.

He is taken under the wing of comedy radio personality Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson), and quickly establishes himself as the most successful recording artist in history.  However, a scandal-fueled love affair with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) and having Michael Jackson parody one of Al's songs (he changes the lyrics of "Eat It" to "Beat It") sends Al spiraling down to the bottom, and leads to a surprisingly higher body count than one might expect.  All of this is told with manic energy, and some truly laugh out loud moments.  The movie captures the same kind of cinematic anarchy of the classic Zucker Brothers comedies (Airplane!, Top Secret, The Naked Gun), and while not all the jokes hit, I often found myself smiling at the attempt they were making.

At the center of it all is Radcliffe's lead performance, who not only manages to recreate Al's stage performances successfully, but brings a certain warped warmth to his performance amongst the chaos around him.  The key to the role in a movie like this is to pretend that these absurd things are supposed to be dramatic, and he pulls it off beautifully.  He plays all the expected moments in a biopic (the descent into drugs and alcohol, turning against his bandmates) to the right insane hilt of parody, but then the movie goes even further, and Radcliffe is game for every far flung thing the script throws.  It's one of the better comedy performances I've seen this year, and continues to prove the actor has being willing to take chances with just about every role he plays.

Weird is simply a great time, and as someone who has followed the singer's career since Christmas when I was 8, I couldn't be happier with this pitch perfect send up of the modern day musical biopic.  I was expecting a merciless satire of the "filmed Wikipedia" approach that so many biopics employ these days, and wound up getting so much more.

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