In "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story," the award-winning, wacky, postmodern satirical biopic about beloved MTV-era cult song parodist, weird but not yet "Weird" Al (Daniel Radcliffe), is sitting with his roommates when lightning strikes, or, at least, Bologna. One of the roommates asks Al to name what he would most like to do in the world. Al, speaking with a fervor greater than mere desire — he's talking about nothing less than a dream — replies with stoic conviction: "He invents the lyrics to a song that already exists." Moments later, The Knack's "My Sharona" blasts out on the radio, and right after grabbing a package of bologna from the fridge, he has his a-ha moment. The lyrics come to her like a flash: “Oh, my hungry little one! Hungry! Open a packet of MY bologna…” An irresistible false parasitic star is born.
"Weird," it turns out, isn't a real biopic. It's a movie that does to the biopic what Weird Al did to songs like "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" and "Beat It": mimics it, bulldozes it, muddies it, flips it. And all with utmost affection. Almost nothing in the film actually happened, except for the parodies of the songs. It's all relentlessly hyped and exaggerated: Weird Al aga became a circus balloon version of himself. However, the film has the spirit of one of the "Naked Gun" movies. He is enthralled by pop culture and infatuated with the tropes he parodies: he mocks himself with such light-hearted devotion that there is something delusional yet sincere about his joke. Part of Weird Al's joke was that his song comedy had an all-too-obvious rib-pushing quality. "Weird," equipping Weird Al's mock art with a mock biopic, takes ribs to the third power. Which turns out to be a nice tickling sensation.
Director: Eric Appel
Writers: Eric Appel, 'Weird Al' Yankovic
Stars: Daniel Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood, Jack Black
The film, to its credit, salutes, prods, and fully understands the not just goofy but outrageous nature of "Weird Al" Yankovic's celebrity. Starting in the early '80s, he was a geek who joined the famous Top 40 singles and, by recreating the songs but substituting the dumbest lyrics possible, made those songs seem reborn as shimmering dumb imitations of themselves. Weird Al's songs were called skits, but using that word is almost elevating what he did. He would take famous paintings and draw mustaches on them, poking fun at them with Mad magazine's broad "everything's a farce, me included" brush crossed with the exuberance of a second-grader singing "Jingle bells, Batman smells." He took pop songs and gave them noogies.
That the songs, in their silly new palm-buzzer versions, became hits again was the joke behind the joke. By removing the original lyrics but retaining the music's catchiness, Weird Al revealed something essential about how pop music works: that the lyrics of more pop songs than most would admit are basically window dressing. Weird Al's version of a song could be about riding the bus, making a sandwich, or loving ice cream from Rocky Road, but the song sounded almost as catchy that way. The joke was on the original artists and on us.
The secret to Weird Al's success is that he may have been the first star of the YouTube/TikTok era, 30 years before the invention of such things. Anyone who did the equivalent today of what Weird Al did in the '80s would now be a viral sensation. And part of what we love about Weird Al is the transparent fact that he had a kind of showmanship that didn't really involve a lot of talent. Many of the videos that become famous on YouTube or TikTok are, at their core, aspirational; to the viewer, they have an "I want to be that" or "If I play my cards right, that could be me" dimension. And that same quality, decades before we started partying ourselves to death on social media, became the goofy glory of "Weird Al" Yankovic.
The film, directed by television veteran Eric Apel from a script he co-wrote with Yankovic, not only lampoons the rise-and-fall clichés of celebrity biopics, as “Walk Hard” did; he lives the clichés even when he lampoons them. In this version of the story, Weird Al grows up in the 1970s with parents who hilariously refuse to approve of his accomplishments. His mother, played by Julianne Nicholson, is a frumpy doomsayer, while his father is an angry crumb factory worker who thinks Al should go to work at the factory. and treats his son dreams like a flower he wants to crush. As he passes an accordion vendor, Nick beats him up, but not before Al walks away.
Watch Weird: The Al Yankovic Story 2022 Trailer
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