Weird: The Al Yankovic Story review
Streaming movie review
I didn’t have a chance to see a movie this week, so I’m posting something I wrote last year that I really liked. I hope you enjoy it as well!
Al Yankovic has never shied away from difficult topics in his music. As his stage name, “Weird Al”, implies, he has a weird obsession with directing his music toward some of the darker aspects of the world. From the stress of being a doctor in “Like a Surgeon” and the lonely and strangely competitive nature of the life of the Amish in his hit song, “Amish Paradise”, to topics of obesity in “Fat” and “Eat It” and the social isolation of being “White and Nerdy”, Yankovic has never shied away from tackling topics that others ignore. In his new movie, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” director Eric Appel digs deep to bring the true story of Al Yankovic to the screen on the Roku Channel.
The movie follows the 100% true story of Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) and his rise and tragic fall. As a young child, Alfred Yankovic was bullied relentlessly by his father Nick (Toby Huss), especially when he would take words to one song and change them to something else. When a traveling salesman (Thomas Lennon) brought an accordion to his home, his mother Mary (Julianne Nicholson) bought it, but made him promise not to let his father hear, lest he fly into one of his notable rages. When he went to an illicit polka party and wowed all of his peers with his incredible accordion skills, he knew he had found his calling.
Eventually he left home, trying to break into a rock band with his accordion. While none were open to his unique style, he eventually found his way to success by creating parodies of other songs, catching the eye of one Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson). While he found success as a parody writer, his true goal was to be noticed for his original music. Once he found that, he never looked back, even when others mistook his originals as the parodies.
The performances in this movie are all pitch-perfect. Radcliffe in particular captures the tortured life of Al Yankovic, from his struggles with drugs and alcohol, to his world-famous anger issues and violent streak. His cold, steely determination to be the wealthiest, most powerful musician alive is all present in Radcliffe’s performance. And he is matched by Rachel Evan Wood’s showing as Madonna, placing emphasis on their tumultuous romance and the way that she used Yankovic to further her career.
This is an impressive documentary-style biopic. One might browse through Yankovic’s Wikipedia page and find a couple nuggets of truth there, like how he recorded his first hit in a bathroom because it had better acoustics, or part of the story about the door-to-door salesman selling him his first accordion, but this film goes far, far beyond the Wikipedia page. So far, in fact, that it can be difficult to tell if this is actually a brilliant comedic movie that is simply a parody of other music biopics. Either way, I was absolutely in tears when the credits rolled.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on November 13, 2022.