Weird: The Al Yankovic Story review: Daniel Radcliffe stars in a loopy fact-free biopic

What kind of fitting biopic would Weird: The Al Yankovic Story be if it played it straight? Eric Appel's directorial debut — which premiered last night at the Toronto International Film Festival and is due on Roku this fall — essentially plays like a movie-length Funny or Die sketch, which it is, technically (or at least produced under that production umbrella): a giddy cameo-stacked satire propelled by murder, mayhem, Mexican drug lords, and athletic sex with Madonna. This is whole-cloth fantasy, of course, and that's the point: less Walk the Line than Walk Hard, with accordions.

Daniel Radcliffe, his hair a curly Bob Ross nimbus and his floral shirts every shade of Trader Joe's, is Al, a kid who dreams of making music — specifically, other people's, but with goofier lyrics. His kind-hearted mother (Julianne Nicholson) and irascible one-handed father (Toby Huss) don't understand this strange changeling they've produced, but they assume he'll come to his senses one day and go to work like his dad at the factory (what do they make there? Nobody knows, but it consumes a lot of body parts). Instead young Al falls hard for polka, goes off to college, and finds his come-to-Jesus moment in a pile of processed lunchmeat. When "My Sharona" becomes "My Bologna" a star is born, literally: Within moments he's on the radio and ruling the charts.

Things move pretty fast in Weird — like Behind the Music smash-cut fast. Soon Al has a record contract, a sprawling McMansion, and a string of hits that won't quit. But he wants to be more than a parody Xerox of whatever's on the Hot 100, and the arrival of Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) brings his first big love affair, along with his attempt at straightforward songwriting (what, you thought "Beat It" came before "Eat It"?). Wood plays the singer as a blithe gum-snapping sociopath, a scheming succubus who aims to wear him out sexually and also get the coveted "Yankovic bump" that comes to artists whose material he takes on.

Those ambitions get them entangled somehow with Pablo Escobar (Broad City's Arturo Castro, having a ball), and a bloodbath rumble in the jungle, but even that sidebar goes by in a rush, so busy is Weird piling on the guest stars and outsized set pieces: A single pool-party scene hosted by Al's soon-to-be mentor Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson) features Conan O'Brien, Jack Black, and about 17 other vaguely familiar faces playing everyone from Andy Warhol to Alice Cooper. Abbott Elementary's Quinta Brunson drops in as a wiggy, nonplussed Oprah, as does Lin-Manuel Miranda as an ER doctor who can't stop the beat.

The movie's celebrity whack-a-mole makes for a good drinking game, no doubt, but Radcliffe still has to carry most of the story, as gleefully careening and surreal as it is. And he commits admirably to the movie's full-tilt concept, conjuring a bizarro-world Al both brash and endearingly sincere (and disconcertingly CrossFit-ripped); he'll throw a man through a plate glass window and drink whiskey like it's water, but still come home to his parents' house for a chips-and-sandwich dinner.

The script, by Appel and the actual Yankovic, who also appears briefly as a skeptical record executive, treats time as a flat circle, folding "Amish Paradise" into the events of 1985 — Coolio's original was actually released a full decade later — and putting Madonna's backup dancers in anachronistic cone bras years before they debuted in the real world. But that's all part of Weird's fast and loose comedy, an alternative-facts fever dream so bent on the certifiably ridiculous that it circles back around somehow to sweetness. You don't need any of it, really, but as far as celebrity hagiographies go, you kind of can't beat it. Grade: B

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