Parody Biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Is Equal Parts Clever and Tiresome

Alfred “Weird Al” Yankovic, gifted singer and accordion player, took the music world by storm by parodying well-known tracks. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” became an ode to food called “Eat It;” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” transformed into a medical anthem called “Like a Surgeon.” It only makes sense, then, that a Weird Al biopic be just as bizarre and eccentric as he is. Directed by Eric Appel and co-written by Weird Al himself, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story tells the story of the musician’s life from childhood to the heart of towering stardom: A true story replete with a healthy assortment of exaggerations and fabrications.

Just like Weird Al isn’t your typical musician, Weird isn’t your typical musician biopic. Based on a 2010 Funny or Die sketch, the film operates as a scathing satire of the subgenre. Appel goes to great lengths to establish his film’s self-awareness from its opening scene: An energetic, anarchic sequence during which Al (Daniel Radcliffe) is wheeled through the corridors of an emergency room, seemingly on death’s door, only for him to spring out of bed and request a pen and paper. This delightfully absurd moment is followed by a musical biopic staple: The record scratch, “I bet you’re wondering how I ended up here” moment. From this moment onward, it is clear that Weird is as much a biopic as it is a parody of a biopic (just like Weird Al’s songs are equal parts songs as they are parodies of songs, get it?).

From there, Weird spirals into a full-blown, unapologetic parody. Like Weird Al’s songs, the jokes are comical if not a little predictable. Following its biopic predecessors, Weird Al’s childhood is chock-full of parental disappointment, with his mother (Julianne Nicholson) instructing him to simply “stop being who you are and doing what you love,” and his father (Toby Huss) beating a man who tries to sell young Al an accordion within an inch of his life. The music biopic genre has been churning out a surplus of cliched misfires like Bohemian Rhapsody, but any joke that runs for an hour and 50 minutes is bound to get old eventually, and that’s exactly what happens here.

Weird’s commitment to the bit eventually gets tiresome. Perhaps its most vexing gag is Weird Al’s relationship with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood), which goes on for far too long. The butt of the joke is that Madonna wasn’t actually a money-grubbing moocher, and it would be shocking if she expressed a desire to be a drug lord. And while this overt character switch-up is funny in theory and elicits laughs for a while, it is so far disconnected from reality that it gets exhaustingly nonsensical at times, and by the third act, it feels eerily like hearing the same joke over and over again.