Kritiken

For my money, one of the only recent indications that Hollywood comedy can be an exciting genre.

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” a superficially clichéd yet thematically unusual bio-pic about the band’s lead singer and guiding spirit, Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek), delivers that secondhand rock memory by rooting its story less in the primary experience of the band’s performances than in a subtly revisionist, sharply current view of Mercury’s life and work.

In the spirit of the classic disposable pop song, this fish-in-a-barrel parody/satire of the modern preening matinee idol burns semi-brightly for a short time before fizzling out to less than nothing.

No man is a Lonely Island. That's the guiding theme of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, in which co-directors Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer play the discarded childhood buddies/musical collaborators of an ascendant Justin Bieber-ish chart-topper who learns that he's better off keeping his friends close. That the pop star is played by Andy Samberg gives the film its shape as a gently self-reflexive allegory.

The fast-moving Popstar finds [Samberg, Schaffer and Taccone as] sharp as ever at feature length. If closing number "Incredible Thoughts," essentially a list of increasingly incongruous images and situations, takes the Island's absurdist wordplay to an extreme, many of the movie's songs have more specific targets.

The mockumentary aesthetic smooths out some of the disjointed plot machinations, and never quite reaches the sublime highs of its closest spiritual cousin This Is Spinal Tap. Popstar is unabashedly a joke-delivery system for a new slate of The Lonely Island's brand of nonsensical yet hilariously accurate pop-music parodies, and this guilelessness is very much in its favor.

Soon after seeing Andy Kaufman's legendary TV special in 1979, I described it as post-humor—comedy in which laughter is replaced by amazement, in which the incongruities that emerge from utter ordinariness are raised to a cosmic dimension. (Buster Keaton may be its crucial forerunner.) In many respects, "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping" is a brightly paced and well-tuned satire on the mechanisms of celebrity. But its best moments share in Kaufman's modern variety of astonishment.

It isn't a satire so much as a warped funhouse reflection of the contemporary scene. It's bright, affectionate, and so keyed into our particular pop moment that it all but hurls itself into a time capsule.

There are peaks and valleys to the movie that are too noticeable. The movie's a tidy 90 minutes or so, but it starts to sag at the hour-mark and doesn't get its oomph back for a while. All that said, though, what's good about this movie is funny, and refreshing, enough to make the dry spots feel more tolerable in retrospect.

No music mockumentary has really managed to reproduce This Is Spinal Tap's comic mojo, but Popstar gets closer than most to that subgenre-defining comedy's mix of the dead-on and the over-the-top, even if it tends to go for quantity over quality... Still, directors Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone—who co-wrote the script and much of the music with their Lonely Island cohort, Andy Samberg—have a lot of fun with the hyperactive tone and tropes of reality TV-era celebrity.

Samberg's Conner swaggers through it all, but he never lets us forget he's just an overtattooed white guy riddled with self-doubt. Even his excessive indoor pastiness, possibly the result of spending all that time in the studio with those 100 producers, is funny, and Samberg, at heart a pasty indoor person himself, knows it.

The result feels bracingly limitless in its comic invention—a music-industry satire that finds humor in music-video parodies, throwaway verbal jokes, and visual gags scattered across the entirety of the frame. Half the fun of Popstar lies in its escalating "can you top this" sense of comic brio.