Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

Directed by Eric Appel, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story uses the life and times of “Weird Al” Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) as a springboard for an oddball and very erratic spoof of similarly-themed fare. It’s clear virtually from the get-go that Weird: The Al Yankovic Story isn’t meant to come off as a traditional, factually-accurate music biopic, as Appel, armed with his and Yankovic’s screenplay, delivers a perpetually irreverent piece of work that does, in the end, fare best in its blisteringly-paced first half – with the emphasis on Yankovic’s (completely invented) early days lending the picture a compulsively watchable and laugh-out-loud funny vibe. (It’s impossible, for example, not to get a kick out of a scene wherein Yankovic comes up with his first song parody, My Bologna.) Likewise, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story’s opening stretch, anchored by Radcliffe’s completely captivating, go-for-broke performance, benefits from the presence of one exceedingly silly yet thoroughly engaging set-piece after another – with the movie’s high-water-mark undoubtedly a terrific Boogie Nights-inspired sequence featuring a raft of delightful cameos. There’s little doubt, then, that Weird: The Al Yankovic Story‘s forward momentum takes a fairly palpable hit once it moves into an admittedly unpredictable yet comparatively underwhelming final third, as the narrative, which hits all the beats one might’ve anticipated, including a somewhat tiresome downward-spiral stretch, veers into a seriously oddball direction that is, by and large, not as compelling as everything preceding it – which does, in the end, cement the picture’s place as a suitably weird (albeit entirely uneven) entry within Yankovic’s less-than-straightforward body of work.

*** out of ****