“Honey, I know it’s hard to hear this, but your dad and I had a long talk and we agreed it would be best for all of us if you would just stop being who you are and doing the things you love.”
Mary
There is always a certain level of mythologising in any biopic but Weird has an Andy Kaufman level of disinterest in audience expectation as it frequently dispenses with the truth entirely. This feels appropriate for a man whose career has been built upon flamboyant oddity and parody, now reworking his past into a world in which his signature accordion is treated like an illicit drug. Daniel Radcliffe is perfectly cast at the centre of this surreal experience, continuing his predilection for absurd roles. Toby Huss provides strong support as his overbearing father, supplying much of the film’s emotional stakes. By contrast Evan Rachel Woods’ cartoonish take on Madonna finds less purchase. Yankovic appears briefly as a music executive who rejected him, with a host of celebrity fans and friends providing cameos that outsize the film’s $8 million budget. The script — written by Yankovic and director Eric Appel — acknowledges criticisms of parody being lazy, before proceeding to assert irreverently that several of Yankovic’s famous parodies were originals copied by other artists. Some of the film’s most amusing sequences parody movie tropes like the genius being struck by inspiration, in this case arising from mundane events like making a sandwich or eating cereal. Radcliffe performs a number of songs but Yankovic’s own vocals are dubbed over, less as a necessary choice than because it was the approach taken in Bohemian Rhapsody. This highlights the primary intention of Weird, which is to be a reactionary breath of fresh air amongst the recent glut of musician biopics that have grown stale and formulaic. It comfortably achieves this goal — weird if not always wonderful.
7/10
