“Weird Al” Yankovic has been around for so long (his career began in 1976, aged just 16) that it’s easy to overlook that moniker: he really is quite weird, isn’t he? Think of Yankovic and a bizarre melting pot of trademarks comes to mind: the perm, the Hawaiian shirts, the virtuoso accordion-playing, the wild-eyed stare — and, fundamentally, a career’s worth of delightfully demented spoof songs, from ‘Like A Surgeon’ to ‘Amish Paradise’.
It makes perfect sense, then, that the first film to tell the allegedly true story of his life is also brilliantly weird, and that a man whose career is built on parody would make a film so wholeheartedly dedicated to taking the piss. It feels true to Yankovic’s eccentric spirit, and it’s made with his full participation (he co-wrote the script, and cameos as a hard-nosed record executive, practically winking to the camera as he berates his on-screen avatar).
At its peak, it has the absurdity and joke-rate of a Naked Gun film — apt, given Yankovic made memorable cameos in all three. Every element is considered fair game, and that go-for-broke silliness is effervescently enjoyable, especially given the recent lull in big-screen comedy.
A ludicrous awards-show climax reminds us that this is a project with a sense of humour to match its subject matter.
Daniel Radcliffe — now surely as famous for playing skinheads and farting corpses as he is boy wizards — hungrily takes on the Yankovic mantle, committing to the deadpan delivery of ridiculous dialogue, and throwing himself into the musical sequences, even if it’s the real Yankovic singing. His Yankovic is not the humble, clean-living jokester of real life, but an ambitious, alpha-male sex symbol (for Yankovic, a self-deprecatingly fanciful notion).
Director Eric Appel — who was also behind the original Funny Or Die sketch on which the film is based — leaves no music-biopic cliché unturned. There is a difficult relationship with parents who just don’t understand (see also: Rocketman, Walk The Line). There is a eureka moment, where inspiration strikes Yankovic and he writes ‘My Bologna’ (see also: Bohemian Rhapsody’s ‘We Will Rock You’ moment). There is a descent into drink and drugs (see also: basically all of them). The running joke throughout is that Yankovic is hailed as a preternatural genius simply for replacing existing song lyrics with new ones. In this goofy reality, he’s bigger than the Beatles.
If it compares favourably to something like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, that early energy isn’t quite sustained into the third act. Yankovic’s imagined relationship with Madonna — gamely played by a gum-chewing Evan Rachel Wood, funnier than she’s ever been — doesn’t hang together as well as it could. But a ludicrous awards-show climax reminds us that this is a project with a sense of humour to match its subject matter. In essence: it’s weird. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
