Daniel Radcliffe commits to the bit 10,000% in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

polygon.com:

Polygon has a team on the ground at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, reporting on the horror, comedy, drama, and action movies meant to dominate the cinematic conversation as we head into awards season. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s TIFF premiere.

For nearly five decades now, one man has defined what parody music looks like at its best. His subjects have ranged from pop icons like Madonna and Michael Jackson to rock and hip-hop creators like Joan Jett and Coolio. He isn’t known by his name so much as by his chosen title: “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Some of the first words uttered in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story are meant as satire:“Life is like a parody of your favorite songs,” a nod to Forrest Gump’s iconic “box of chocolates” line. This is what every single beat of Eric Appel’s feature film expansion of his Funny or Die short of the same name aims for. Why wouldn’t a biopic of a parody artist’s life be a parody itself? Accordingly, Weird is relentless about poking fun at practically every damn subject it touches. Co-written by Appel and Yankovic himself, the film both embraces and skewers most of the musical biopics that came before it, along with the history of music itself. It’s something of an onslaught of humor, using every scene as an excuse to deliver one or more jokes — usually a lot more. Much like Appel’s original faux-trailer short, the feature rewrites Yankovic’s life by creating a strange amalgamation of reality and fiction.

Weird starts at the faux end of Yankovic’s life, in a hospital death scene quickly revealed as a fake-out and setup for a long history. Appel and Yankovic (played in the film by Harry Potter series star Daniel Radcliffe) take their sweet time moving