Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

This weekend, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story was released on the Roku Channel. This movie is about parody songwriter Al Yankovic in his "totally true" rise to fame including his torrid celebrity love affair and alcoholic lifestyle. I was sold on this movie the first time I heard about it. A movie about Weird Al starring Daniel Radcliff with Dwight Shrute as Dr. Demento, it sounded just crazy enough to actually work. With his fame coming from parody songs, I was really excited and interested to see how that was going to be incorporated into the movie.

This movie did not disappoint. It was able to perfectly accomplish exactly the kind of film it was going for, right down to the tone and story structure. In true Weird Al fashion, this movie is essentially a parody of every musician biopic including the rise to instant fame montage, the love affairs, the parent issues, and the fall to drugs and alcohol. This film can parody all of the overused tropes by using those tropes in such an absurd fashion. In the same way that Weird Al dives into the weird and wacky in his songs, this movie dives all into the weird and completely pulls it off. Aside from being able to pull off the story and tone in the exact way it was going for, the movie is also really funny. The movie mercilessly makes fun of everything about musician biopics and goes so over the top with it, that it is absolutely hilarious. There are so many ridiculous moments in the film that you just cannot help but laugh and have a good time. Finally, Daniel Radcliff does such a great job at playing Weird Al. He is totally able to pull off the weirdness and high energy of Al and you can tell he just having so much fun in the role. I just had so much fun with this movie and was so happy that they went all out in the weirdness.

There are only a couple of negatives for me about this film. Though it is important to know that these are all very minor issues. The first issue is the voice dubbing of Weird Al's voice whenever Daniel Radcliff is singing. It is pretty obvious that he is lip-syncing and was a bit distracting. The other issue was that the editing cuts between scenes were a bit clunky, It seemed like they designed this movie with commercials in mind so the cuts between scenes and transitions are very obviously meant for a commercial even though some of the cuts don't even have commercials in between.

Overall, this movie was a lot of fun and was able to achieve the exact tone and humor that one would expect out of a film about Weird Al making this movie one of my favorite movies of the year.

Score:8.5/10 Grade: A-

Recommendation: A must-watch for Weird Al fans and worth checking out for casual movie watchers