‘Weird: The Al Yankovic Story’ Film Review: Mock Rock Biopic Is Ridiculous Fun

thewrap.com:

lot, “Rocketman” set out to be true not in a literal sense but only in an emotional one (and was all the better for making its fakery transparent), and “Elvis” was a freewheeling mixture of semi-reality and extravagant fantasy.So if it’s the case that regular rock biopics are weird, what of one whose title begins with the word weird?

It certainly doesn’t figure to be one for the nitpickers (which at times have definitely included me) who point out that a song is in the wrong place chronologically or that this character is a composite or that so-and-so never did such-and-such.Questions like that don’t mean a damn thing when it comes to “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” a churning and very entertaining load of poppycock that makes not the slightest pretense of being an accurate retelling of the story of everybody’s favorite song parodist, Weird Al Yankovic.In fact, the whole point is that it isn’t accurate, that it’s a whacked-out alternate reality in which young Al got his first accordion after his father beat a door-to-door accordion salesman to a bloody pulp, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” was a parody of Weird Al’s “Eat It” and Madonna (played by Evan Rachel Wood with gum-snapping zest) was both Al’s girlfriend and a murderous psychopath.The film, directed by Eric Appel, produced by Funny or Die and distributed by Roku, takes Weird Al’s approach to music – take a well-known song and change the words to make them funnier – and applies it to the rock biopic.

Since Yankovic co-wrote it with Appel, it should hardly come as a surprise that it takes all the hoary rock-bio tropes, makes fun of them, sets them to a polka beat and populates the resulting ridiculousness with enough cameos and Easter eggs to sate the theater full of.