Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

The unexaggerated true story of the greatest musician of our time. From his conventional upbringing, where playing the accordion was a sin, to the height of stardom, "Weird Al" Yankovic reached for the stars and made his dreams come true. An instant success, and an undeniable sex symbol, the pressures and perils of fame eventually lead Al down a dark path, and straight into the arms of an infamous romance, one that will ultimately destroy him…

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story tells the tale a tortured artist, a true virtuoso, and a musical genius, a modern-day Mozart born to the stage, whose unique vision changed the way we all looked at the world.

It tells the tale of a man… gone too soon.

Al Yankovic’s father was a hard man, a hard man who believed in discipline, a serious man who lived in a serious world, a maimed man who lost a hand down at The Factory where he worked hard making something, but it’s unclear what. He was a man who not only hated music in general, who not only specifically hated accordion music, but he really hated the extremely niche kind of music that interested his son… changing the lyrics of well-known songs to something else completely different. “What you’re doing is confusing, and evil!” his father would shout, at his wit’s end. Al’s mother tried to lovingly guide her son away from his all-consuming parody song and accordion addiction, but when she discovered a Hawaiian shirt tucked away beneath his bed, she knew then that her son must be true to who he is.

So, she secretly buys him an accordion from a door-to-door accordion salesman, but only after his father viciously beats that salesman…

From then on, Al never played the accordion in public, lest his father discover his shameful secret. But then one fateful night, after sneaking out of the house, leaving a hay-boy in his bed to fool his parents, all so that he could attend a high school friend’s polka party being held while the kid’s parents were out of town, Al is dared to play the accordion. “Play, Al,” the other kids pleaded, straining to hold out an accordion with both hands, for they were but teens, and accordions are famously unwieldy, “play!” When he at first refused… the entire party did the chicken dance at him.

So he played. He played his heart out.

“Weird” Al Yankovic was born.

And the world was forever changed.

In just a few years, he had climbed the charts. He was dominating the airwaves. The world had “Weird” Al fever, baby. But true fame still eluded him. It was only after Al was given some guacamole laced with LSD that he was finally able to birth forth unto this world a song known as “Eat It.”

A 100% original song, “Eat It” was a more than a hit, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and that success turned “Weird Al” Yankovic into the most popular recording artist of all time. People Magazine dubbed him the “Sexiest Man Alive” and when he was on Oprah, he wore a chain of mini platinum records around his neck, one for every time his record went platinum. Truly, the world was “Weird” Al Yankovic’s oyster, and he was noisily slurping it all up. Slurp. Slurp. Slurp.

But a meteoric rise only means one thing…

Soon comes the fall.

A fateful knock on the door of his gilded mansion revealed the boy-toy herself, Madonna. She and Al had an instant and undeniably intoxicating chemistry. Madonna Ciccone was a bad influence, desperate for wealth and attention, and yet Al loved her. Still, the question hung in the air, why was she there? Was she only using Al? Did she only want Al because she wanted him to write a parody of her soon to be released new single? Did she only want that sweet, sweet “Yankovic Bump” to her sales? Or… did she truly love him? Whatever it was that Madonna wanted, it soon became clear that if she had to drown Al in booze in order to get it… she would.

All of the drugs and the booze and the constant sex with Madonna only led to Al burning down a lot of bridges, and hurting a lot of friends. Then, Michael Jackson stole Eat It, and wrote his own parody. Everything was going wrong. After that, not even a near-fatal drunken car crash, and the resulting inspiration he gleaned from his trip to the Emergency Room—which led to Al changing the words to Madonna’s new single, creating yet another mega-hit—could pull the famouly tortured artist out of his downward spiral. The dark times would only get darker when Pablo Escobar decided to kidnap Madonna in an effort to get her world-famous musician boyfriend to play at his birthday party. It was a fatal miscalculation on Escobar’s part, one that would soon show the drug kingpin that he had messed with the wrong writer of parody songs…

Awash in cartel blood, and betrayed by Madonna’s greed in the wake of the Escobar cartel’s sudden power vacuum, Al ends up at working the Factory, making something, just like his old man, but it’s unclear what. However, it is there, amongst the fire and steam, that Al reconciles with his estranged father. It’s there that he discovers that his father used to be a songwriter, and that he was once Amish too. It’s there that Al not only finds a… paradise… as well as redemption, but a new purpose, a new drive that propels him back into the limelight, a bright and shining star once again.

It’s bittersweet new dawn for Al, of course, as this new beginning only leads to that fateful moment where he was gunned down on stage at the Shrine auditorium in 1985 by Madonna’s cartel thugs… only to gain a final revenge on the woman who ordered his death, when he lunged up from the fresh dirt of his own grave to grab her wrist as she laid flowers on his final resting spot.

In the end, much like his revenge-driven undead rage, “Weird” Al Yankovic’s music lives on… forever.

I’m not a fan of bio-pics.

I generally find them bombastic, melodramatic, obvious, and boring. So for me at least, the best kind of biopics are the ones that recognizes that biopics are stupid. Like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story recognizes this. It’s a bio-pic fever dream really, hitting all of the rises and falls, all of the triumphs and the tragedies, all of the pathos and celebrations that you’d expect from these trypically overwrought reverential retellings of the life of some celebrity, but all cranked up to 11, and without a single care as to whether or not any of it actually happened.

The best part, of course, is that some of it actually did happen.

Some of it.

Al Yankovic did become an accordion player because of a door-to-door accordion salesman. He did write “My Bologna” to the tune of “My Sharona.” He did write “I love Rocky Road” to the tune of “I love Rock ‘n Roll.” “Eat it” was one of his biggest hits. Madonna did request that he parody “Like a Virgin.” Coolio really did have beef with him over “Amish Paradise.”

But is there any real drama in any of that? Is there anything all that interesting or noteworthy? I mean, besides the whole Coolio beef part, obviously. Why shouldn’t a guy, especially one who’s famous for writing parody versions of pop songs, write a parody version of his own life? Especially when it’s basically a Looney Tunes-like tour of 1980s pop culture? The fact that the end credits is nothing but a montage of photoshopped photographic “evidence” is the perfect capper.

Also, and maybe it’s just me, and I would probably blame Bugs Bunny for thinking this, but the pool party at Dr. Demento’s house is what I imagined every Hollywood party was like when I was a kid. There’s Tom Petty and Elvira. There’s Devine, and Andy Warhol. Grace Jones is there too. Gallagher, of course. Pee Wee. Tiny Tim. Alice Cooper. Devo. Everybody’s there. Why not? It’s a party, man. And of course, they’re all wearing their familiar costumes, and doing their shticks, like a pop culture Laff-A-Lympics or a Muppet wedding.

Which is basically what the MTV Video Music Award ceremonies are…

Best of all, the film pretty much maintains itself throughout its running time. Most “SNL type” films, at best, would probably have been better off as 20-ish minute skits, instead of a feature-length movie, But Weird: The Al Yankovic Story manages to keep it fresh for its whole run. Mostly. This is due to the random lunacy of the script, which reminded me a lot of the film Airplane, as it’s mostly a bunch of random nonsense that is strung together fairly well, with some funny running gags and call-backs through-out.

In a nutshell, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story dares to be stupid.

It’s not changing the world or anything, and I’m not saying that I’m gonna rewatch it a bunch of times or anything, but still… I laughed.