Directed by: Bryan Singer
Starring: Rami Malek, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Lucy Boynton
Rated PG-13, 134 minutes
As conventional wisdom would have it, not all bad movies have bad scripts, but every good movie has a good script. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the new biopic of Freddie Mercury, is the contradiction to this rule, a fun and flashy dive into the Queen frontman’s illustrious life that succeeds despite a laundry list of hackneyed rock ‘n’ roll clichés weighing it down. Aptly, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is to movies what Queen was to rock music: a mishmash of sentiments and imagery both melodramatic and campy, serious and silly, that shouldn’t work together but somehow do.
Following the rise of Queen from their early days playing by-the-books verse-chorus-verse songs in pubs, through the years of stadium tours performing their singular style of operatic rock songs, and ultimately to their iconic Live Aid set in 1985, the movie mainly gets by on the backs of its likable cast. As Mercury, Rami Malek (“Mr. Robot”) delivers one of the year’s most chameleonic performances, slipping seamlessly into Mercury’s idiosyncrasies and mannerisms and, most importantly, stage antics. If not a role with exceptional depth, it’s one that Malek treats with admirable commitment.
Not to be overlooked are Mercury’s bandmates, managers, record executives, and friends, each played here with remarkable affability. Gwilym Lee (“Midsomer Murders”) and Ben Hardy (“X-Men: Apocalypse”), as Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, respectively, stand out as the film’s most relatable characters, representing a simultaneous exasperation with and admiration of Mercury’s flamboyance. And yet, even playing foil to Mercury’s excess, Lee and Hardy still manage to make their characters breathe. Queen was not a singer with backing musicians, the movie says, but rather a family of equals; these performances do that statement justice.
At the same time, that everyone is so likable speaks to the movie’s biased method of mythmaking. Consider that the surviving members of Queen hung around the film’s production, ostensibly providing guidance on the portrayals of Mercury and consulting on the music, but also, in some cases, calling the shots—such as getting rid of Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”), the original choice to play Mercury, because they didn’t think he was taking the role seriously enough. This self-curation is evident in the movie’s surprising and disappointing cleanness; in the sanitized, PG-13 world of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” every artistic risk the band ever took paid off, every song was a hit, and every argument they ever had was resolved because one band member, noodling around on his instrument at precisely the moment of greatest tension, produced the main riff of their next big hit.
Worse than the movie’s obvious deference to Queen’s inflated self-image is its sheer lack of imagination when assembling a story out of the band’s career arc. Many are the flat recitations of backstory, the softball interview questions dressed up as dialogue, the scenes that work individually but don’t add up to a unified whole. Then there are the montages, which repeat themselves thematically (if you thought you would only get one montage showing the band recording an album, think again) and occasionally border on the inane. To depict Queen’s international tour, for example, the movie spends thirty seconds flashing the names of cities in neon colors over a black screen; the moment feels more like a second-year video student’s project on title design than a segment that should have appeared in a finished film.
It’s a testament to Freddie Mercury’s strength of will and to Queen’s enduring popularity that the film overcomes these tedious blemishes and manages not only to entertain, but to wring honest emotion from its viewer; not even the regular pitfalls of biopics and rock ‘n’ roll movies are enough to dim the bright glow of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” And when the film reaches Queen’s Live Aid appearance, it rewards viewers for their patience with a faithful and nearly full reproduction of the band’s set. That the film ends on this extended concert scene is its boldest choice, and the one that pays off the most, especially because Mercury, grappling with his HIV-positive diagnosis, states just before the concert that he wants to spend his remaining time focusing on his art, not on the looming spectre of death. With all the nettlesome biographical details finally out of the way, the movie is generous enough to grant him—and us—that wish.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 11/16/18.