Weird: The Al Yankovic Story works best when living up to its title

Biopics about famous artists have long been so ubiquitous that their tried-and-true tropes have become ripe for parody. One that’s particularly easy to mock is the “Eureka!” moment in which the celebrated artist reaches an epiphany that leads to a creative breakthrough, whether it’s Jackson Pollock’s first paint splatter leading to his signature style or Johnny Cash overhearing chatter that inspires the lyrics of a future hit. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a suitably irreverent meta-biopic of the lovably loopy song parodist co-written and co-produced by Yankovic himself, spoofs this cliché by having Al (Daniel Radcliffe), right after venting to his roommates about the difficulty of achieving his dream, which is to “make up new words to a song that already exists,” begin making a bologna sandwich while The Knack’s “My Sharona” plays on the radio.

Along with the added catalyst of his roommates pronouncing “bologna” as “bolo-nuh,” this produces the creative spark that leads Al to conceive of “My Bologna,” a parody of The Knack song. The joke, of course, is how banal and ridiculously specific a “Eureka!” moment this is. But sadly, there’s a miscalculation in how soon we’ve gotten that joke—and how long the scene continues to go on after that point.

That happens a lot in Weird, which boasts a high enough hit-to-miss ratio in its gags to succeed as a comic biopic but can’t help milking the gags that hit until their freshness evaporates. With Yankovic, whose decades-spanning career was recently commemorated with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and who packs massive arenas with his live shows, deservedly having reached pop culture icon status, the time was right for this kind of goofy cinematic tribute. Director and co-writer Eric Appel, a veteran of very funny TV shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Silicon Valley making his feature directorial debut here, is an ideal, comedically like-minded collaborator for the songsmith to take on. Together, they’ve made a film that, especially in its superior second half, is as clever and enjoyably absurdist as Weird Al favorites like the food-themed “Beat It” parody, “Eat It,” and the Coolio riff “Amish Paradise,” even if it lacks the sheer density of jokes that makes Yankovic’s music so irresistible—that quality where you’re still laughing at the ingenuity of a lyric you just heard while he’s already singing the next, equally hilarious one.

In true biopic fashion, Weird begins with its subject’s childhood as a misunderstood social misfit. Young Al (played as a kid by Richard Aaron Anderson) dreams of musical stardom, but his strict father (Toby Huss) insists that he one day work at an anonymous factory like he does, while his mother (Julianne Nicholson) similarly tells him that he’ll be happy once he’s “stopped being who you are and doing the things you love.” So little Al must practice his accordion in the closet to avoid his parents’ disapproval.

Once Radcliffe dons the curly wig and glasses of the grown-up Weird Al, the character gains the freedom to pursue his musical passions, as well as the approval of a more encouraging father figure in the form of the trailblazing radio jester Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson). With “My Bologna” being the first of many hits for him, Al rockets to the level of fame he’s always dreamed of. But it quickly goes to his head, with Al becoming the kind of celebrity who wears his Gold and Platinum records on chains around his neck and who stumbles across the stage during his concerts shirtless and spewing booze-fueled rants to the crowds.

As the preceding sentence indicates, Weird grows more outlandish and less beholden to biographical narrative form as it goes on, which is a good thing. Director Appel’s inexperience with long-form storytelling partially explains the film’s overly slack pacing, but a bigger factor is his adherence to biopic conventions even as he’s comically tweaking those conventions. It’s no coincidence that director Jake Kasdan’s biopic parody of a fictional, Cash-style crooner, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, hit a similar “good enough, but should’ve been funnier” wall (with apologies to that film’s growing legion of bigger fans) while taking the same formula-following approach. By contrast, the most hilarious music world comedies, like This Is Spinal Tap and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, are much looser narratively and clock in at under 90 minutes (Weird, at 108 minutes, is much closer to two hours than it needs to be).

Weird finds its comic footing as it eventually gets, well, weirder, spiraling off into tangents about Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood, nailing the Material Girl’s confident snarl) cozying up to Al for what one character deems “that sweet, sweet Yankovic bump” that artists he parodies experience on the sales chart, and about Al going toe-to-toe against drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (Arturo Castro). The closer the film comes to resembling Yankovic’s anarchic, late ’80s starring vehicle UHF, the funnier it gets.

Fans of Weird Al are sure to be pleased by Radcliffe’s committed lead performance, which captures the performer’s nerdy exuberance without stooping to mere imitation. They’ll also be thrilled with an original song that Yankovic wrote for the closing credits, “Now You Know,” which mischievously comments on the credits as they unfurl. It’s actually a better distillation of the performer’s mile-a-minute comic brilliance than the film itself, which, for all its laughs, demonstrates the difficulty of sustaining a comic rhythm for more than the three-to-five-minute length of a song.