In addition, Yankovic was not the number one star on Earth in the 1980s, did not have a torrid love affair with Madonna, did not have run-ins with Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, did not commit several murders throughout the 1980s, and did not write “Eat It” before Michael Jackson made “Beat It.” And Al did not have a brief period when he acted like a diva, drank heavily, and got arrested in Miami like Jim Morrison.Įventually, we catch on to what the movie is doing, and it’s frequently very funny. The film tells us that Yankovic’s parents (Toby Huss and Julianne Nicholson) were violently opposed to his becoming a musician, playing the accordion, or being “weird” in general (in real life, they were rather supportive Yankovic really was encouraged to play the accordion by a traveling salesman but was not then met by a horrific beating from his father. Weird is based on a decade-old Funny or Die bit, which is why Funny or Die has prominent placement in the credits despite not having much of a footprint anymore. It’s still, however, consistently hilarious, and a worthy addition to the Weird Al legend. Instead, Weird is a highly unconventional biopic, in the sense that just about nothing in it is true. Nor is it a point-for-point evisceration of the music biopic genre, a la Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox story, which was a concern from the movie’s trailers.
Weird, which will debut in early November on the Roku Channel, is not a conventional music biopic.
It could have used that moment in 2014, when Yankovic was told he had achieved his first-ever #1 album, as an emotional climax. Weird Al’s arc, after all - a song parodist, utilizing the polka tradition and the accordion, who has gone on to remain famous for going on 40 years now - is unlike any other in the history of popular music, while he’s also managed to stay one of America’s only universally beloved celebrities for all of that time. What’s really fascinating about Weird: The Al Yankovic story, the new biopic of the famous song parodist that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is that if it had been a straightforward telling of Yankovic’s life, it still could have been quite good. TIFF 2022: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Review