By Robert Scucci
| Published
As an avid musician, I’ve always had a disdain for shows like Behind the Music, as well as the onslaught of musical biopics that have tainted the cinema landscape for the past 20 years. The primary reason I dislike this form of revisionist history is because of how many important details are left out for the sake of pacing, leaving so many interim moments throughout an artist’s career incomplete, open-ended, or downright exaggerated. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, written and developed by “Weird Al” Yankovic himself and starring Daniel Radcliffe in the titular role, was created with people like me in mind who have grown tired of the self-aggrandizing saga of the larger-than-life rock star, and viciously lampoons the entire genre for the love of the game.
From Humble Beginnings To Superstardom
At first setting its tone as a serious rock and roll biopic, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story elaborates on the icon’s humble beginnings, when his mother, Mary (Julianne Nicholson), secretly purchases an accordion from a traveling salesman (Thomas Lennon), much to the disapproval of his father, Nick (Toby Huss). Al becomes estranged from his parents after his rebellious side manifests in the form of a performance at an illegal polka party, leading his father to believe that he’ll never be the company man he wants him to because his mind has been polluted by his love for music.
Living with his roommates years later, Al starts parodying songs he hears on the radio, which escalates to playing at biker bars, and eventually leads to his introduction to his mentor, Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson). Al’s passion for quirky polka parody tunes quickly snowballs into a full-blown career as a multi-platinum selling artist living a lifestyle of rock and roll excess.
Serving as a cautionary tale about the unchecked ego one experiences at the height of their popularity like the many biopics we’ve all seen before, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story not only captures the curly-haired accordion-playing maestro’s meteoric rise to fame, but also the beginning of his downfall. As Al grapples with the fact that he’s being used by other artists to give their original songs a boost in ratings known as the “Yankovic bump,” he vows to cut his teeth as an original composer, resulting in a beef with Michael Jackson that may very well end his career as he knows it.
An Exercise In Egregious Exaggeration
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story takes every single beat you’d find in films like Walk the Line or The Dirt and flips them upside down, sideways, throws in a couple of machine guns for good measure, and somehow ends up devolving into an over-the-top action movie where Daniel Radcliffe’s Al Yankovic, complete with ripped abs and a look of vengeance in his eyes, has to take down Pablo Escobar (Arturo Castro), who captured the love of his life, Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) for nefarious reasons.
You read that correctly; Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, like the man, the myth, the legend’s music itself, is a parody of the highest order that takes the piss out of every single musical biopic with a sense of humor that’s so unhinged that you can’t help but love how shamelessly it goes for the jugular. Daniel Radcliffe, who has recently become one of my favorite actors because of his willingness to take on bizarre roles, like the fart-propelled corpse in Swiss Army Man, knew the assignment going into this movie, and looks so much like “Weird Al” Yankovic that you’d think they were actually related.
If you’re tired of rock stars being held on a pedestal for the sake of posterity in the form of a dramatic musical biopic, then Weird: The Al Yankovic Story should be the next movie you stream for free on The Roku Channel.
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