REVIEW: Weird: The Weird Al Yankovic Story, a biopic done weirdly

You’ll probably hear many people say this time and time again, but Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is weird. But in a very good way, and one that is very fun to watch multiple times.

Quinta Brunson as Oprah WInfrey, and Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al Yankovic in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, courtesy of TIFF.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story debuted to the world at TIFF (you can read our review of it here), to rapturous applause. The film is a biopic about everyone’s favourite parody musician, Weird Al Yankovic. Here he’s played by Daniel Radcliffe, no stranger to playing pop culture icons as his first film role was that of Harry Potter. Radcliffe’s casting elicited many confused responses from people, but he is able to pull the role of with ease.

He’s clearly loving playing the role as well, having a ton of fun wearing the mustache and curls. He says that even he had struggled with the notion to cast him, adding that there must be “people that are physically closer” to Al that could take on his essence. But as he read the script, he realized that accuracy was not what the crew was going for. “As soon as that moment clicked it was like ‘oh great, I know what this is.'”

Evan Rachel Wood and Daniel Radcliffe doing a press conference for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

The script goes to great lengths to show not the truth of Al’s upbringing and initial musical success, but instead be a parody of music biopics. As for Al himself, he says that’s the only way a biopic of him cold properly be done. He says that “there are some interesting things that have happened in my actual life, but not anything interesting enough that would merit a Hollywood biopic.” So the film, much like his music, leans into the parody aspect.

Weird Al Yankovic in a press conference for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, courtesy of Roku.

And really, is there another way that anyone could’ve made a biopic of Weird Al Yankovic? An adaptation of a Wikipedia page wouldn’t cut it here, we need to see the artists’ essence applied to his portrayal in order for a film to truly be weird. And weird this is (how many music biopics involve massive action scenes?).

Eric Appel in a press conference for his new film Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, courtesy of Roku.

The  idea for Weird initially came about nearly a decade ago as a Funny or Die video. That was a parody of music biopic trailers, which starred Aaron Paul (from Breaking Bad) as Al. The director of both the video and film, Eric Appel, says that the idea started for the film started in a coffee shop with Weird Al as the two were “watching biopic trailers on a laptop.” From the beginning, the sense of parodying the biopic was the guiding force here.

Weird is an incredibly fun film, that’s more Walk Hard than Walk the Line. But it’s a fun experience for fans of Weird Al, for fans of biopics, and for anyone looking to have a fun time. What’s interesting about this film is it’s also the very first original film by a relatively new name in the streaming service game. This film is the first original film created by the Roku channel. This is only accessible through the Roku player, which is a streaming device box that contains access to many streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Spotify.

But it also contains the Roku channel, a carefully curated selection of content. Now that Roku has produced it’s own proper film, who knows where this little streaming device could go from here?