'Bohemian Rhapsody' Will (Only Occasionally) Rock You: NPR

Let's talk about the teeth.

They're impossible to ignore, that prosthetic ring of upper chompers worn by Rami Malek in the listless musical biopic Bohemian Rhapsody as he – and the movie itself – from the now familiar, VH1 Behind The Music stations of the rock-music cross: discovery, meteoric rise, betrayal, precipitous fall, contrition, redemption.

They're … something, those teeth. They distend Malek's upper lip, just as the real ones did Freddie Mercury's – more, actually; it's not so much an overbite as an übercock. They're so hilariously extreme, in fact, that they make Steve Carell's foxcatcher nose look like Ralph Fiennes' Harry Potter one.

Malek's performance is so fearlessly committed – he's Freddie by way of Eartha, all slithery and sinewy and sinuous – that he could have left them in the makeup trailer and still managed to locate, and home drive, Mercury's mercurial affect.

But their conspicuous presence is emblematic of the film's lack of confidence in itself. What could be a strutting, fabulous testament to the glamor of Queen's arena-rock showboating is instead hamstrung with the need to explain, and then underline that explanation, and then circle it, then reproduce it in a slightly larger, then sit us down and read it to us. Through a megaphone.

Two members of the Queen are listed as consultants, which may be one reason the film, directed by Bryan Singer until he was replaced by an undefined Dexter Fletcher about two-thirds of the way through mainstream photography, feels so safe and circumspect. The band has conflicts, by Anthony McCarten, Darkest Hour and The Theory of Everything their minds are similarly unsurprising angles) they are all a sweet bunch of blokes who just want to entertain, man. And even Freddie's ego-driven and subsequent descent into drug-fueled decadence is carefully couched as that of a good-hearted innocent falling under the sway of eeeeeeee manager Paul Prenter (Downton Abbey's Allen Leech, getting the villain edit).

Early worries that the film might elide Mercury's queerness prove unfounded, mostly. Sort of. True, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) is a young girl who has a good relationship with her husband. his life, with his upbringing, would find himself reluctant to abandon a relationship that represented a life he had been brought up to expect for himself. Goal Bohemian Rhapsody is not content to let that, or indeed any, linger ambiguity. "The worst part," says Mary, during their breakup scene, "It's not your fault."

Point of order here: His sexuality is not his fault. But is not it, but it does not make a difference to sexually active relationship (while secretly indulging his own appetites) is, uh, very much his fault. and that's what the film glosses over; Mercury causes it, again and again, to give him a pass. Thus the portrait we get from him lacks any characterizing texture or contradictions, and only succeeds in flattening him almost beyond recognition.

In the process, it flattens history, in the too-familiar way biopics are wont to do. There's a scene in the movie 1994 Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle Harold Ross (Sam Robards), "Well, if this magazine is about to be about New York, why do not you call it …" (long, thoughtful pause) …. The New Yorker? "

Oof.

in Bohemian Rhapsody, similar oof-moments, which are meant to play on our familiarity with the source material, fall thick on the ground. A bandmate noodles around with a certain chord progression that will, we know, come to define both. "What if we allow the audience to participate somehow?" another bandmate asks, before demonstrating a little something he's been working on – the stomp stomp clap, stomp stomp clap, stomp stomp clap that transforms the song "We Will Rock You" into a musical experiment in mass mind-control. Such moments of cinematic rib-nudging can not help but feel cheesy. But here, when they concern themselves directly with Queen's music, they work.

Because that music works. It's big, it's cheesy, it's bombast … which is to say: It rocks. Singer / Fletcher films the hell out of the movie's musical performances, locating that hormonal insistent thrum that bypasses the higher brain functions and makes straight for the pleasure centers. The film is booked by the band's performance at Live Aid in 1985, which looks great, with soaring pseudo-drone shots of the crowd at Wembley Stadium thronging around the mid-field production booth like pilgrims circling the Kaaba.

The crowds, and the stadium, are fake, of course – they gleam with the too-clean crispness of CGI. Your brain processes this, then, it's going to happen, because Malek-Mercury is singing its guts out on "Radio Ga Ga."

Understand: Empirically, "Ga Ga Radio" is a terrible, terrible song. You know this – you process it, take it up and go away – because it rocks. And in those moments like that one, when Bohemian Rhapsody allows it to be done so much too muchstomp stomp clap, stomp stomp clap) rock you.