Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Should Have Been Weirder

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Photo: Aaron Epstein/Roku

Fictional movies involving real-life people often begin with a disclaimer telling us that what we are about to watch is not technically true. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story begins — at least, in the version currently streaming on the Roku Channel — with “Weird Al� Yankovic himself confidently assuring us that everything in the movie is 100 percent accurate. Which is of course a very Weird Al thing to do. The insistence itself serves as the disclaimer.

What then proceeds is a completely fanciful mock biopic in which we see young Al Yankovic (played as an adult by Daniel Radcliffe) wounded by his working-stiff father’s (Toby Huss) refusal to let him follow his dream of making up fake lyrics to existing pop songs. He rebels and learns to play the accordion in secret, becoming the outlaw toast of his town’s wild teenage “polka parties.� He then shoots to megastardom on the strength of his musical parodies, which become more popular than the actual hits themselves. He pivots to writing his own original songs, which are so huge that big artists start parodying him. (In Weird’s version of events, Weird Al had a runaway hit with “Eat It� first and then an opportunistic Michael Jackson copied him with “Beat It.�) Then he spirals into alcoholism and violence and self-importance, as one does. All along, he still yearns for his stern father’s love.

It of course makes sense that a Weird Al biopic would simply be a spoof of other music biopics. Not just because parody is his whole thing, but also because, well, the true story of his rise doesn’t appear to have been all that interesting or full or filled with movie-worthy drama. In some ways, the most touching aspect of Weird is that it presents us with a vision of all the things that could have gone off the rails in the real Al Yankovic’s life. What if his parents were stridently unsupportive of his chosen profession? What if his father had a psychopathic hatred of accordions? What if he succumbed to fame and addiction? What if Pablo Escobar was creepily obsessed with him? What if he had a lengthy affair with Madonna?

It’s funny on paper, I guess. And some of it is funny in execution. There are bits here that work marvelously: Thomas Lennon’s turn as a traveling accordion salesman who is beaten to a bloody pulp by Al’s father; a scene at a pool party where Jack Black as Wolfman Jack and David Dastmalchian as Queen bassist John Deacon challenge our hero to an on-the-spot parody of “Another One Bites the Dust� (after conceding defeat, Wolfman Jack is tased and removed from the event); a throwaway shot of Coolio fuming in the audience after “Amish Paradise� wins a Grammy. The film is a Funny or Die production, which is perhaps why it never transcends its sketch-comedy DNA. I can imagine laughing at any five minutes of the movie, but I found it disappointingly hard to laugh at 108 minutes of it.

That said, Daniel Radcliffe certainly impresses with his commitment to the role. His Weird Al is intense, driven, and ripped, which actually carries some whiff of authenticity; in his heyday, the real Weird Al’s superpower was that he always committed to the bit. Radcliffe takes that idea to another level, and you can genuinely imagine that a figure this passionate could spiral into violence and self-destruction. The actor, through his performance, makes the necessary intuitive connections that the otherwise half-hearted script, credited to Yankovic and director Eric Appel, refuses to.

The problem with Weird is that it’s just … not that weird. Maybe, in a universe where Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (and any number of other fake biopics) didn’t exist, Weird might have felt more novel, more transgressive. But weirdness, as a concept, does not exist in a vacuum; it exists in relation to other things, and in Weird’s case the others got there first, many times over. You can recognize echoes of other comedies — Zoolander, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, etc. — not all of which were even all that original in the first place. As a result, one keeps wanting the picture to go in stranger and bolder directions. To be fair, it feels like it’s at least attempting that in its second half, when it strays into action-movie territory. But is that really all that weird? We’ve had even more action spoofs than we’ve had biopic spoofs, no? All too often, it feels like Appel and Yankovic are going for distressingly low-hanging fruit, and the movie runs out of juice the longer it goes on.

Among the things that made Weird Al’s songs so special were their ingenuity and unpredictability. Over and over, he surprised you with his rhymes and with the settings of his parodies. Remember, the original songs he was poking fun at were massive hits. Any teenage jackass could have come up with fake lyrics for these songs — and, as I recall, many of us did. But Weird Al was smarter than us, at every turn. Even if you didn’t care all that much for joke songs, it was hard not to appreciate a verse like: Our prices are low, my staff is underpaid / You can buy off the rack or have it custom-made / And it’s all guaranteed to never shrink or fade / ’Cause of my reputation as the King of Suede. This fake Weird Al movie could have used some of the real Weird Al’s cleverness. Weird doesn’t feel like a parody; it feels like an impostor.