Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
dir. Eric Appel
Rated: TV-14
image: ©2022 Roku
Every time I hear one of a select group of pop hits from the last 40 years, I start singing the wrong words. They might be lyrics about the Star Wars character Yoda, when the song is actually about a woman named Lola. They might be lyrics about making prank phone calls when the song is really about chasing waterfalls. Every time this happens – and I mean every. single. time. – my wife rolls her eyes and threatens to divorce me.
I will never stop, though, because I am a lifelong "Weird Al" Yankovic fan. My music collection contains every album from the most successful and famous parody-song artist of all time, save two. (The last one I obtained was 2006’s Straight Outta Lynwood, so I’m missing 2011’s Alpocalypse and 2014’s Mandatory Fun.)
All that to say I might not be the most impartial judge of a movie about – and co-written by – Yankovic. The new film, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, directed by comedy writer and filmmaker Eric Appel, in his feature debut, is an absolute hoot. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, since I was clearly in the tank for it from frame one, but Weird is the goofiest, most ridiculous, funniest comedy of the year.
I feel for people trying to write and produce straightforward, sincere music-legend biopics these days. The structure and formula for these kinds of films has seemed to calcify in the last couple of decades. The territory has been so well-worn at this point that parodying it is the easiest way to mine fresh, original ideas from it.
Even the parody version of the music biopic has been done. Weird is a spiritual cousin to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. (“The wrong kid died!”) That 2007 film was a hilarious sendup of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, while also spoofing plenty of other musicians and musical styles for good measure. (All four of the actors playing the Beatles are in top form, but Paul Rudd as John Lennon is transcendently funny.)
There’s another minor connection between Walk Hard and Weird. The latter was based on a short film, in the style of a movie trailer, that Eric Appel made in 2010 for, and published at, the comedy website that he was working for at the time, Funny or Die. (Yankovic appeared in a cameo for the short film, as he does in the feature.) Walk Hard was co-written and produced by Judd Apatow, who has ties to the Will Ferrell co-created Funny or Die.
What Weird brings to the party is the fact that it’s a parody/spoof of the music biopic genre that’s about a real-life musician instead of a fictional character.
I somehow managed to avoid seeing the trailer for Weird even once before I screened the movie. I had zero idea of what I was in for besides the fact that it was about Yankovic’s life and career. I knew something was up when Yankovic himself appeared in an introductory video before the film – which is streaming for free on the Roku channel – talking about the “totally 100% true, not at all made up biopic” I was about to see.
Within the first ten minutes of Weird, we learn that Yankovic’s father so hated what he considered the evil music his young son had fallen in love with, that he savagely beat a door-to-door accordion salesman. Nick Yankovic would never allow a “devil’s squeezebox” into his home. Little Alfred was encouraged by his mother to “stop being who you are and doing what you love" in order to keep the peace.
Even better in this over-the-top sequence of foundational childhood trauma – a staple for biopics – is the swelling emotional orchestral score as Al’s father, in a rage, discovers his son’s extensive collection of Hawaiian shirts. Al’s fashion sense and groundbreaking musical ambitions to “make up new words to a song that already exists” is beyond shameful in his father’s eyes.
So, what can we trust as true in this non-fiction biopic that’s also a zany spoof of the genre in the vein of the Naked Gun movies? Very little. And that’s what makes it so fun. There are tidbits – which I only know because I’m a fan – of veracity sprinkled throughout Weird. I mentioned to Rae – not only was she game for watching Weird with me, she also sat through UHF, Yankovic’s 1989 comedy, in preparation (she was not a fan) – that Yankovic did actually record his demo of My Bologna, his parody of My Sharona, in a bathroom.
He was also championed and mentored by radio DJ, and impresario of novelty/comedy songs, Dr. Demento. The slyness of Weird comes in the way in which it tweaks these facts to lampoon the hero’s rise-and-fall-and-rise structure of musical biopics. We never see Dr. Demento, for example, in anything other than his signature top hat and tails. In the world of this movie, Demento never took a day off, never so much as stepped out of the house in a t-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes.
Every scene functions – in a hilarious way that could never be true in someone’s actual day-to-day life – to reinforce Al’s dedication to becoming the most famous parody artist in history. As an adolescent, Al gets busted at a right-of-passage style teen party. Of course, within Weird, it can’t be a regular keg party. It’s a polka party, and the trouble starts when Al picks up his accordion and begins to wow the crowd. His parents’ shame and anger at their son being mixed up in something as seedy as a polka party is so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh.
It's nothing more sophisticated than intense stunt casting, but the sheer volume of familiar faces that turn up in Weird is inspired. Rainn Wilson, as Dr. Demento, turns in his funniest work since the days of The Office. In an early scene in the film reminiscent of the pool party scene in Boogie Nights, Demento invites Al to a pool party at his house. In attendance is a who’s who collection of artists and celebrities who likely never crossed paths even tangentially with Demento.
My head swam as I tried to quickly decode not only which famous people Appel and Yankovic were lampooning, but also which celebrities were cast in the cameos. In blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances are Conan O'Brien as Andy Warhol, Emo Philips as Salvador Dalí, and Paul F. Tompkins as Gallagher, to name only a few. Jack Black – who turns up as one of the aforementioned Beatles in Walk Hard – is hilarious as Wolfman Jack, the iconic DJ from the early days of rock-and-roll radio.
Wolfman goads Al into showing his true genius by coming up with new lyrics, on-the-spot, to Queen’s hit Another One Bites the Dust. This unique jukebox musical treats us to Al instantaneously writing the lyrics to one of my favorites, Another One Rides the Bus.
The wigs featured in Weird are almost stars in and of themselves. Star and creator of the hit series Abbott Elementary, Quinta Brunson makes a cameo as Oprah Winfrey. She’s in the biggest, hairsprayed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life wig you’ve ever seen. The wig makes you laugh before Brunson’s take on the media mogul makes you laugh again.
The most outlandish wig of all rests upon Daniel Radcliffe in the titular role. The simulacrum of Yankovic’s iconic mop of unruly curly hair sitting atop Radcliffe is at least three-quarters the size of the actor’s head. Radcliffe goes for broke as Yankovic and his performance is of a pitch-perfect piece with the rest of the movie.
Another actor, Robert Pattinson, in the wake of his star-making turn in the Twilight saga, decided he would only accept future roles if they were appropriately weird enough. Radcliffe, after becoming the embodiment of Harry Potter, seems to have made a similar choice, but he’s gone the direction of funny-weird as opposed to Pattinson’s serious-weird. There is a satisfying funny-weird double feature of Weird and Swiss Army Man, featuring Radcliffe’s bonkers 2016 performance – directed by Everything Everywhere All at Once’s filmmaking team Daniels – waiting to be programmed.
I won’t spoil too much more of Weird except to say that things really get nuts when this “biopic” presents as fact that Yankovic, in an attempt to be taken seriously, decides to only write original songs. His first original effort? Eat It. Things get more outrageous when – within the world of the movie – Michael Jackson releases a song that sounds exactly like Yankovic’s original composition, called Beat It.
In the strangest turn of the movie, the character Yankovic faces the cliché fall-from-grace of musician biopics when he starts dating…Madonna. Evan Rachel Wood nails the mid-80s aesthetic of the edgy pop-rock superstar. The shenanigans she ends up getting Yankovic drawn into are too, well, weird to describe here.
You’ll have to see it to believe it.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- As with the rest of Yankovic’s output, if all you need is a smile and to forget the world, if only for a while, Weird will do the trick. It made me laugh to beat the band. Parts, anyway.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Yankovic dubs all the singing for Radcliffe. It’s weird, especially for fans, who will hear an older Yankovic singing songs he’s famous for singing as a much younger man, but it works with the overall goofy tone of the movie.
- The highlight of the movie for me is the absolute life-and-death way they treat Al coming up with his first parody (My Bologna). Appel really accentuates the music biopic moment of the artist having the first breakthrough moment. Here, it’s played for pure comedy.
- Shoutout to Patton Oswalt in a tiny cameo. He also appeared in the short film. I have to imagine Oswalt is a “Weird Al” fan from way back.
- I loved the Harry Potter shoutout when Dr. Demento tells Yankovic that he doesn’t want to be only his mentor, but, in a play on his name, he wants to be Yankovic’s De-mentor.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- As I mentioned in my review, Weird is available exclusively (at least for now) on the Roku Channel streaming service. Roku Channel’s all-in approach to get some notice in the heavily saturated streaming market with the release of Weird is all fine and good, but the service is free. We all know what that means: ads. I haven’t been forced to endure ad breaks while watching a movie in I don’t know how long. It. Sucks.