Bohemian Rhapsody

This is enjoyable nonsense, in many ways. As a biopic, it’s got flaws running through it – history is rearranged, facts are left out, and at least one dead person is given a portrait that is borderline defamatory – but it has two key strengths. One is that the unlikely story of the rise of Freddie Mercury and Queen is material that is just too fascinating to resist, even when told with some tone-deaf dialogue and clunky situations, and Rami Malek gives the role everything he has and everything the part can take, giving both the wild charisma bomb of a front man and the slightly insecure, isolated boy stuck in the middle of an international phenomenon. And the music is given its appropriate place in the forefront of the story – the plot of the movie basically ends fifteen minutes before the credits and we get a pitch perfect presentation of Queen’s Live Aid set (minus one song that’s been cut for time). It somehow doesn’t matter that none of the other members of Queen get to display much of a discernible personality, that its presentation of the gay scene seems drawn almost entirely from the seedy world of “Cruising”, and that it’s very definitely built as a mainstream audience pleasure machine rather than a deeper analysis of the group (if you were hoping to hear why Queen thought touring South Africa during the apartheid bans was a good idea, you’re outta luck). But as that mainstream audience pleasure machine, it works gangbusters.