‘Weird’: You’re Not Ready for the Glory That Is the Weird Al Biopic
It started with just a few of them, a random passerby or two milling about Toronto’s King Street in Hawaiian shirts and curly-haired wigs. Then, as if following some primitive instinct, they’d find each other and begin to chat. At one point, four twentysomethings dressed in the same floral printed garb and checkered Vans slip-ons begin to dance for a woman filming a TikTok video, while a fifth one played a jaunty tune on his accordion. By 11pm, they were a handful of tiny groups starting to congregate in front of the Royal Alexander Theatre, laughing and posing for pictures and talking to a pair of puppeteers, one of whom had made a baby-sized felt replica of thus evening’s man of honor.
It wasn’t until you approached the ticketholder line that was already starting to snake around the block, that you saw them en masse: dozens of lookalikes striding forward in a row, some with musical instruments and many more with fake mustaches, suddenly coming around the corner in a herd-like formation. The faint sound of someone singing about Bologna to a polka-ish beat could be heard on the wind. These folks had come to see a man named Al. They were here to get weird.
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To say the scene outside of the Weird premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday night was enthusiastic would be understating both the amount of Yankomania on display and how seriously these disciples worshiped their hero. The opening night of the fest’s popular Midnight Madness sidebar — and the first to play at the venerable Royal Alexander, which TIFF is now using as one of its main venues this year — Eric Appel’s feature-length extension of his Funny or Die video follows the life and times of a man who would come to redefine fashion, sex-symbol accordionists and parody songs as we know it. Much like a Weird Al concert, the faithful and their cosplaying brethren turned up to see someone who dreamed of one day being “arguably the greatest accordion player in an extremely specific genre of music.” Yet even they weren’t ready for the Al-gony and the ecstasy that would unfold onscreen once the lights went down. No human being could be.
It was at Al’s concerts that most folks first caught Appel’s fake trailer for a fake biopic, which saw a star-studded cast re-enacting key moments of Yankovic’s creative journey. Al would play it before his shows, the director said in a post-screening Q&A, and the response was always so rabid — “When do we actually get to see this?!” — that Al himself reached out and declared that they had to give the fans what they wanted.
The two cowrote Weird 2.0’s script, which recalls how a young Alfred Matthew Yankovic was at the mercy of his strict, one-handed father (Halt and Catch Fire‘s Toby Huss). One night at the dinner table, he dares to Al sing; the boy comes up with “Amazing Grapes,” a spiritual testament to the power of the delicious, juicy snack, on the spot. Dad is aghast: Did you just take the lyrics of a popular song and…change the words?! “What you’re doing is confusing — and evil!” he yells.
After Pops Yankovic nearly beat a traveling accordion salesman to death, Al’s kindly mom (Julianne Nicholson) takes pity on her son and buys him the instrument. He can only practice in secret, however, and never play it in public. Then, during Al’s adolescent years, peer pressure at a high school polka house party — you know how teens can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet 19th-century Eastern European sound — causes him to reveal his fleet-fingered talent. Never mind Dad’s determination to get Al a job next to him at the factory, making…well, nobody knows what they make, it’s a factory, don’t question it. His future in the dog-eat-dog world of parody songwriting is set.
When the now-adult Al (Daniel Radcliffe, very much killing it) tries to kickstart his musical career and join one of the local bands, however, he keeps getting the high-hat. Milling about the apartment with his three roommates one day, Yankovic searches desperately for inspiration. The guys ask him to make them sandwiches. The Knack’s “My Sharona” comes on the radio. He looks at the lunch meat on the table (when you stare into the bologna, the bologna stares back into you). Suddenly, you’re watching a modern classic be born into the world, one comedic-lyric-composed-over-a-recognizably-popular-tune-via-a-nasal-voice-and-accordion-backbeat at a time.
The rough childhood, the Eureka moment, the discovery by Doctor Demento (Rainn Wilson), the dalliance with “Holiday”-era Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood, killing it even more than Radcliffe’s Yankovic and that was already a massacre), the free-fall of global fame turning him into a monster, rock bottom at the bottom of a bottle and a Phoenix-like rise from the ashes. Should none of it be true, it all deserves to be. Weird is to music biopics what Weird Al’s ditties are to whatever Top 40 tunes he twists and transforms: a wacky, nerdy, near-juvenile parody version that somehow, through the sheer willingness to dare to be stupid, comes off as better than the real thing. Better, or at least equally ingenious in how it sends something up.
And if it does feel a little too familiar to the original two-and-a-half minute video, down to Yankovic himself reprising his cameo as an oily record exec who doesn’t hear a hit (except “Eat It,” which the fake Yankovic insists is an original composition and that Michael Jackson then steals to make “Beat It”), it’s still a surprisingly, sustainably hilarious watch. Part of that comes down to Radcliffe and Wood playing both rock & roll clichés with volume dials stuck at 11 and exaggerated versions of their real-life counterparts, with Daniel unleashing a deadly deadpan expression every time some ridiculous new obstacle comes his way. (Fun fact: In addition to being the Bob Dylan of polka-parody pop, Weird Al is also a John Wick-level killer.)
The other part of it is that, like the artist himself, Weird knows how to make fun of something with affection, the occasionally dollop of barbed wit and a knack for making imitation seem like the sincerest form of creativity. It’s not exactly the second coming of Walk Hard, though it’s the best Weird All movie since UHF [cue laugh track and maybe a Whoppee Cushion sound effect] — and like Al himself, it still hits each beat with an infectiously goofy exuberance. When the director, Radcliffe and Wood walked out onstage at the end, the applause was hearty. When Al shuffled shyly out onstage, the standing ovation kicked into gear. For a few hours, everyone was collectively willed into a state of punch-drunk joy weirdness, and the victory lap was earned.
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