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LOS ANGELES, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- Walk Hard is the definitive spoof of musician biopics, but its creators had to invent the fictional character of Dewey Cox to do it. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a spoof of Yankovic's actual biography. Weird, which streams Friday on the Roku Channel, mocks the format of the biopic in some similar ways to Walk Hard. Yankovic flashes back to his entire life, and many of the early scenes blatantly embellish the adversity Yankovic faced.
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As young Alfie (Richard Aaron Anderson), Yankovic's parents, Mary (Julianne Nicholson) and Nick (Toby Huss), discourage their son from practicing the accordion. Al's secret accordion practice is treated like a devilish monstrosity.
The actors get it. They play it like total drama and that enhances the absurdity of teenage Al (David Bloom) becoming popular through playing accordion.
By the time Al grows up (Daniel Radcliffe), he lip-syncs to Yankovic's actual singing. Al moves away from home to become a success with his music.
A common trope of musician biopics is to show a scene in which the artist discovers the inspiration for their famous track. To actually incorporate the lyrics of Yankovic's parodies in those scenes is a new level of parody, but they really only do that for one song.
Early scenes do parody some of Yankovic's true stories, but Weird eventually takes off in entirely fictional tangents. Al dates Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) and his parents continue to disapprove of his success, just because that's what parents do in musician biopics.
Eventually, Weird starts to claim that some of Yankovic's parodies are actually originals. The film milks that claim extra hard to make it absolutely clear it's a lie.
Yankovic goes through a self-destructive phase like Johnny Cash or Freddie Mercury did in their biopics. Then it becomes a full-on action movie, absurdly.
Weird is like a feature-length Funny or Die sketch, but it maintains the joke for 108 minutes, including a new Yankovic song over the end credits.
Director Eric Appel expands his own Funny or Die short, and includes some inspired fictional encounters between Yankovic and celebrities.
Weird covers the greatest hits of Yankovic's early career. Then, it skips from "Like a Surgeon" to "Amish Paradise" with a brief mention of "Fat."
No later songs are featured, nor are Yankovic's actual originals that comprise half of each album. And yet, after ending with 1995's "Amish Paradise," the film claims to end in 1985, adding to the absurdity.
A straight "Weird Al" Yankovic biopic might actually be more interesting than the dry cradle-to-grave summaries many biopics present. Taking himself seriously would never be Yankovic's style, though, so the parody version satirizes action movies and the music industry, as well as the biopic format.
Weird is a fittingly "Weird Al" tribute to Yankovic's life and career. He ultimately spoofed himself and what fans might expect a "Weird Al" biopic to be by abandoning the true story halfway through.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
