“Bizarre Al” Yankovic has been round for therefore lengthy (his profession started in 1976, aged simply 16) that it’s simple to miss that moniker: he actually is sort of bizarre, isn’t he? Consider Yankovic and a weird melting pot of emblems involves thoughts: the perm, the Hawaiian shirts, the virtuoso accordion-playing, the wild-eyed stare — and, basically, a profession’s value of delightfully demented spoof songs, from ‘Like A Surgeon’ to ‘Amish Paradise’.

It makes good sense, then, that the primary movie to inform the allegedly true story of his life can be brilliantly bizarre, and {that a} man whose profession is constructed on parody would make a movie so wholeheartedly devoted to taking the piss. It feels true to Yankovic’s eccentric spirit, and it’s made along with his full participation (he co-wrote the script, and cameos as a hard-nosed document government, virtually winking to the digital camera as he berates his on-screen avatar).

At its peak, it has the absurdity and joke-rate of a Bare Gun movie — apt, given Yankovic made memorable cameos in all three. Each aspect is taken into account truthful recreation, and that go-for-broke silliness is effervescently gratifying, particularly given the latest lull in big-screen comedy.

Daniel Radcliffe — now absolutely as well-known for enjoying skinheads and farting corpses as he’s boy wizards — hungrily takes on the Yankovic mantle, committing to the deadpan supply of ridiculous dialogue, and throwing himself into the musical sequences, even when it’s the actual Yankovic singing. His Yankovic is just not the common-or-garden, clean-living jokester of actual life, however an bold, alpha-male intercourse image (for Yankovic, a self-deprecatingly fanciful notion).

Director Eric Appel — who was additionally behind the unique Humorous Or Die sketch on which the movie is predicated — leaves no music-biopic cliché unturned. There’s a tough relationship with dad and mom who simply don’t perceive (see additionally: Rocketman, Stroll The Line). There’s a eureka second, the place inspiration strikes Yankovic and he writes ‘My Bologna’ (see additionally: Bohemian Rhapsody’s ‘We Will Rock You’ second). There’s a descent into drink and medicines (see additionally: principally all of them). The working joke all through is that Yankovic is hailed as a preternatural genius merely for changing present track lyrics with new ones. On this goofy actuality, he’s larger than the Beatles.

If it compares favourably to one thing like Stroll Laborious: The Dewey Cox Story, that early power isn’t fairly sustained into the third act. Yankovic’s imagined relationship with Madonna — gamely performed by a gum-chewing Evan Rachel Wooden, funnier than she’s ever been — doesn’t hold collectively in addition to it might. However a daft awards-show climax reminds us that it is a undertaking with a way of humour to match its subject material. In essence: it’s bizarre. We wouldn’t have it another means.