Bohemian Rhapsody: The Show Must Go On

Dear friends, there are few musicians that match the legendary status of Queen, a band with a massive catalogue of hits that forever changed the conventions of pop music, whose excess in their art was only rivaled by that of their titan of a frontman, Freddie Mercury. They were dynamite with a laser beam, they were princes of the universe, and for a time, they were the champions of the world. If there’s any band out there whose story is prime for a movie, it’s them, and for a while it was one of my most anticipated releases of the year. But even then, the red flags were hard to ignore. First, they lost their intended lead actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Then they lost director Bryan Singer for constantly being late and generally being a pain in the ass to work with (and possibly for being a pedophile). My fears only turned out to be half-confirmed. When it comes to capturing the creative process of Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody does it like no other. Otherwise, it's a grim reminder that not enough people have seen Walk Hard.

Our story begins when two students, Brian May (Gwylim Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) lose the lead singer of their pub band, Smile. Immediately after, they’re approached by Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek), an eccentric local with a massive voice and an electric stage presence. With the addition of bassist John Deacon (Joe Mazzelo), they change their name to Queen and begin their road to stardom with their eclectic marriage of the anthemic rock tunes with the bombast and theatrics of opera. It also chronicles Freddie’s love life, particularly the formation and disintegration of his romance with his dearest friend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) and the manipulation he faced from his predatory manager Paul Bretner (Alan Leech).

The first big problem this movie faces is how safe it plays it. About 45 minutes in, you’ll begin to notice that the movie starts following a pattern: the band forms, they go from playing local clubs to filling out stadiums, we see the origins of some of their biggest hits followed by their performance onstage, tensions between band members and management arise, repeat until it reaches a boiling point and Freddie hits rock bottom before getting the band back together to perform at Live Aid. And this wouldn’t be such a bad thing if that were how it really went down. I get that biopics have to bend the truth to give the story more a dramatic backbone, and the surviving members of Queen had producer credits and veto power over creative decision and probably didn’t want to be completely overshadowed by Freddie or relegated to just the other guys in the band, and granted, Brian, John and Roger get way more screen time than they would’ve if not for their input, but the extent the changes goes past twisting the truth and enters historical revisionism territory.

Probably the grossest example of this is the portrayal of Freddie Mercury. The fascinating thing about Freddie was that he was a man of many contradictions. He was a painfully shy introvert who just happened to be one of the most energetic frontmen in rock and roll onstage. He was a gay man whose true love was a woman. The movie makes no pretenses about his difficult upbringing or how he could be a prima donna from time to time, right down to his tendency to throw lavish Great Gatsby-esque parties at his mansion and his great love of cats, but it doesn’t feel like the script has a full understanding of what made the man tick. This is reflected in some of the inaccurate turns the story takes. Some are less egregious, like making up a fictitious clash with an EMI executive played by Mike Myers (See, it’s funny because Wayne’s World was partially responsible for “Bohemian Rhapsody” re-entering the charts in 1991), while others are less forgivable, like the band’s reaction to Freddie announcing his solo album, the circumstances leading to their Live Aid performance, or Freddie’s announcement that he had AIDS. It also downplays his sexuality a lot, occasionally tiptoeing toward getting to the nitty gritty, but never gets around to taking off the kid gloves.

That said, despite my many gripes with how this movie handles Queen’s legacy, when it’s at its best, it’s absolutely breathtaking. Although the story itself was mangled into a by-the-numbers rock biopic, its shining moments are when it focuses on the band and its creative process. The cast is what really sells it. Rami Malek commits 200% to the role, so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if he got an Oscar nomination for his portrayal. I may have spent the last two paragraphs complaining about how they rearrange the specifics, it captures the essence of what made Freddie such an icon, and by the end you’ll be cursing that such a great talent was taken from us so suddenly. Even if much of its foundation is built on farce, it’s not off-putting enough to stop the emotional rollercoaster from going at full speed.

Malek does a majority of the emotional heavy lifting, but he’s rounded out by a splendid cast. The rest of band especially is perfectly casted, and the movie is at its best when it just follows them around being a band. And it all comes together in a mammoth showstopper of an ending where they recreate their legendary Live Aid performance almost in its entirety, recreating the extraordinary feeling of what it must’ve been like to see them live.

Bottom line, as much as I wanted to love it, Bohemian Rhapsody was caught in a landslide, no escape from reality. A career and personality of this magnitude deserves better than a story as basic and predictable as this, but I’ll be damned if everyone involved didn’t give it their all. If I were judging this solely on how much enjoyment I got out of it, I’d be giving it a much higher grade. But that’s the problem about this crazy little thing called love: it always finds ways to frustrate you.

6/10