Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody are the latest biopics to be released, and where the former succeeds at honoring its performer, the latter struggles to capture her legacy. The structure of musical biopics can make it particularly difficult to encom all of an artist's career. They must often settle on giving either a broad overview of their "Greatest Hits" or focusing tightly on a specific time period of their lives.
Even though he doesn't sing every song in Weird, Daniel Radcliffe is delightfully quirky as Al Yankovic, and Naomi Ackie is a powerhouse as Whitney Houston. Weird goes for the broad strokes approach to Weird Al's entire life, whereas I Wanna Dance With Somebody hones in just as Houston's career takes off in 1983 and follows it until a comeback in the mid-'00s. Both biopics have very different tones and styles of performance from ensemble casts, but only Weird manages to be something worthy of the singer at its center.
Weird Challenges Musical Biopic Assumptions
Weird subverts expectations for a musical biopic by challenging some basic assumptions about its structure, and it works well for the premise. Several storylines in the movie are completely fictitious, like his relationship with Madonna, but some moments in Weird mirror Al Yankovic's life. Every scene that seems like it should be overly dramatic or sensational because it's part of an underdog story, like fighting with his parents to play the accordion, becomes humorous and campy.
By comparison, I Wanna Dance With Somebody leans hard into dramatic storytelling, which might seem appropriate for a singer capable of such depth of feeling as Houston, but so often seems to weigh the film down. The dazzling heights of her fame with "The Greatest Love Of All" and "I Will Always Love You" lead to an inevitable fall from grace, but rather than feel like Houston's story, it feels like any generic musical biopic, with an exploration of Houston's bisexuality thrown in as an afterthought. For a singer who challenged so much of the music industry, I Wanna Dance With Somebody doesn't say anything new about Houston's life.
Weird Is A Musical Biopic That Honors Its Subject
Al Yankovic built a career on parodying famous songs, so it's only fitting that his biopic is a parody of biopics. In the same way that only the glitzy production of Elvis by Baz Luhrmann reflects The King's dazzling showmanship, Weird is a comedic and surreal biopic that reflects the irreverent style that made Weird Al such a success at the same time that Houston's star was also on the rise. The exaggerated elements don't hurt the premise because, based on Weird Al's own sense of humor and personality, a straightforward and dramatic retelling of his life wouldn't fit.
Tailoring the biopic to the artist is one of the reasons Weird reviews are so positive and something that I Wanna Dance With Somebody needed to do in order to find success. Houston's biopic copied the same format as other biopics without making it as distinct and special as her legacy, resulting in an underwhelming and generic experience. Unfortunately, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story had a lot of input from Weird Al himself, giving the final word to the performer, which is clearly what Houston should have had as well.
