Movie Nation

He responded to a poster soliciting a new lead singer for a punk band. Despite ripping through “Beat on the Brat” in the audition, he gets a hard pass.

Maybe it was the instrument he used as accompaniment to that Ramones cover, an accordion he bought from a door-to-door salesman.

High school pals lured him to a teen party, which he was shocked to see is a “POLKA party!” Starstruck girls arguing the relative merits of Myron Floren or Dick Contino, the guys pick on our hero, taunting him with “The Chicken Dance.” But just as he was playing the keys off his “devil’s squeeze box,” somebody yells “It’s the COPS. Everybody, RUN!”

In his heyday, he whipped up the “completely original” “Eat It,” only to have “that kid from The Jackson Five” rip him off with a parody cover version. He was inspired to compose his first hit when “My Sharona” played on a radio as he was serving up some non-Oscar-Mayer processed meat sandwiches.

Fame, riches, MTV Music Awards, Grammys, breaking Beatles chart records, a tortured longtime love affair with Madonna, who lusted for a “Yankovic bump” if he sent up “Like a Virgin, busted in Miami for “lewd behavior” on stage, considered to “replace Roger Moore as James Bond” (As if!), stalked by drug lord and obsessed-fan Pablo Escobar, it’s all part of the legend, the lore of “Weird” Al Yankovic, “arguably the most important accordion player in an extremely specific corner of music.”

Littered with truths, untruths, amusing whoppers and celebrity cameos, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” might be the most fun of any movie this year — on paper.

Getting screen icon Daniel Radcliffe to play national treasure Weird Al, hiring “Silicon Valley” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” veteran Eric Appel to co-write and direct, and having people from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Evan Rachel Wood (as Madonna) to Rainn Wilson (as Dr. Demento) and Jack Black (Wolfman Jack!) line up to be in it, how could this miss? Slightly more than half the time?

The idea was to make a parody version of a musical bio-pic about the world’s most celebrated parody artist, complete with a rapid rise from a hard-luck childhood to early rejection to stardom to booze-fueled meltdowns, “Rambo” shootouts back to rock bottom — factory work at the same place where his accordion-hating old man (Toby Huss) lost a hand on the job decades before.

Wood has the most fun, vamping up the mercenary Madonna. But Will Forte, Black, Conan O’Brien (Andy Warhol!) and many others seem tickled to be here, even if the jokes are Al-level groaners, only some of them landing.

“Weird” gets by on the warm feels we all have for Yankovic and his place in the culture. And it’s cute seeing too-obvious “inspirations” for this version of a pop hit, or that one. I have to say, Appel and Al make those musical bio-pic tropes almost as spine-tingling as the moment Freddie Mercury conjures “Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the Fandango!” out of thin air in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The gags may be, to a one, low-hanging fruit. The cheapness of the enterprise is embraced with every ugly wig, every “That’s not the REAL Oprah/Dali/Diana Ross and Hulk Hogan,” every song given an over-the-top music video recreated live — on stage. Al does all the singing, by the way, and has a cameo as a jerk record exec.

Truthfully, there aren’t enough gags and giggles to make this take flight. It sort of lumbers by for 100 minutes before sputtering out in the finale. Radcliffe? He doesn’t give the guy the weirder than life, larger than life turn he warrants.

The funniest stuff is in the earlier scenes, with his Dad beating the hell out of that accordion salesman (Thomas Lennon), Al obsessively tuning into “The Dr. Demento Show” under the sheets, discovering he doesn’t have to be “a closet accordion player” any more.

Because accordions are cool. All the kids love accordion players. The evidence is right here on the screen, just the way Al remembered it. And no, he didn’t grow up in North Dakota.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood, Rainn Wilson, Jack Black, Julianne Nicholson, Toby Huss, Thomas Lennon and “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Credits: Directed by Eric Appel, scripted by Weird Al’ Yankovic and Eric Appel. A Roku Original.

Running time: 1:47

“Deborah” is a somewhat deflating “reunion” comedy with a sci-fi twist. In a genre of films where “taking stock of my life” and “what might have been” are the asked and unanswered questions of one and all, “Deborah” has a gimmick that gives one the chance for a do-over.

Deborah is also the name of that gimmick. It’s a digital assistant of the Alexa/Siri mold, a sort of faceless wig manikin with a glowing light and a soothing voice that will do anything its inventor, Al (Kevin Bigley), his wife Ada (Deborah Ann Woll of “True Blood”), or any of the others they’ve invited to their striking and remote designer home for a weekend.

“One Tree Hill” alumna Sophia Bush is Nora, single and fond of her wine, if not her outspoken “Trump voter” younger brother (Michael Waller). Scott Michael Foster is outgoing, obnoxious and top-knotted Chet, who is here with the lovely and politically-correct Gabby (Ciara Renée). And Frank (Arjan Gupta) is the bookish wild card whom no one seems to know all that well.

Al and Ada are big on running Deborah through her paces, which the others join in on — “Deborah, invent a song in the style of an ’80s power ballad.”

Well, that’s novel.

But the others don’t know Deborah’s magical power, which Al and Ada use to avoid this awkward moment or that nasty red wine spill on their new white carpeting.

“Deborah, rewind 15 seconds…Deborah, rewind six minutes.”

The others are never the wiser. At first. But “residual memory” gives them a hint, and eventually the home owners fess up. Deborah can give anyone a do-over by just asking. We’re treated to the erasure of an impolitic phrase, or a character taking several cracks at coming up with the perfect come back.

As there’s an uneven number of people here and “old feelings” from high school or wherever might rear up, Deborah is going to be very busy tidying up people’s timelines.

In practice, and as relayed here, that’s pretty damned boring. Seeing a scene track through seven or more times at this point, hearing a middling line repeated, ad nauseum, doesn’t turn out to be funny or revealing as Noga Pnueli’s “Big Chill meets Back to the Future” takes a turn towards the serious.

It turns out, tempering this character’s bigotry or that one’s nihilism via a time-rewind gadget isn’t logical or the least bit interesting.

Whatever the virtues of the somewhat colorless cast, the script’s idea of wit and edge leaves them literally “stuck in a loop.”

But at least they avoided that wine stain. Me? I want that last 86 minutes back, Deborah.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Sophia Bush, Deborah Ann Woll, Scott Michael Foster, Kevin Bigley, Ciara Renée, Michael Waller and Arjan Gupta

Credits: Scripted and directed by Noga Pnueli. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:26

Selena Gomez has a hit, critically-acclaimed TV series — “Only Murders in the Building” — film and TV work lined-up with her taking on producing responsibilities, and a pop music career that shows little sign of winding down as she settles into her thirty-first year on the planet, her twenty-fourth in the public eye.

She’s become a template for the way to parlay child stardom into adult fame, building a career that is the envy of most of her contemporaries.

But when she first appears on camera for “My Mind & Me,” a documentary by the director who made Madonna’s infamous “Truth or Dare” behind-the-glam film, she’s bitching about about costumes for an upcoming stage tour. She is brutally self-critical.

“Actually, I think the boobs are good,” she notes of one costume, before griping about “the booty that I don’t have” and the effort it still takes — she turned 30 in June — to “not look like a twelve year old boy.”

Being that self-critical is a hallmark of this film, made before, during after her “Revival” tour. That’s when Gomez, riding high on the charts and getting film and TV offers, achieved “everything I’ve ever wished for,” as she says in the film’s voice-over narration. “But it’s killed me.”

Depression and anxiety attacks led to the cancellation of much of the tour. Her ongoing issues with Lupus, leading to a kidney transplant, would follow. She’d announce that she’s been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

That turns her film into an exercise in self-help, a deep (ish) dive into her background and ongoing struggles and the entertainment industry’s huge investment in her persona, her love life and the paparazzi attention that would unnerve anyone, much less a witheringly self-critical anxious, bipolar depressive.

We follow her into interviews, glimpse a bit of her stage show, meet the assistants who remind her about medications, watch her hair and makeup “team” at work and see Gomez’s meltdowns over rehearsals. No matter how big you get, if you aren’t worried about it all going down the tubes, you won’t stay there.

The film also serves up montages of everything that bubbles through the media once that tour is canceled — TMZ “rumors,” inane TV and radio chat show appearances, incessant “Justin Bieber break-up/Justin Bieber marriage” questions, hospitalization.

The “road back” part of the story arc has her driving through her childhood neighborhood, stopping to visit neighbors she knew and recalling her meteoric rise to fame after “I booked ‘Barney (and Friends),” with snippets of “The Wizards of Waverly Place,” the breakout series that saddled her with that “f—ing DISNEY kid” label that to her has been so hard to shake.

What emerges from the film is a performer at war with looking too “young,” a grizzled showbiz veteran at 30 remembering where she came from and still selling disposable pop with a stage image that cannot shake that “too young” label despite every effort by her to sex that image up.

Selena is sharing her story and using her celebrity to push increasing access for youth mental health services, raise money for a string of righteous causes, all while maintaining her status at the top of the entertainment pyramid.

Tricky.

One take-away from “My Mind & Me” is how good someone famous has to be at shaking off or at least at hiding all the insecurities that dog us all, Gomez more than most.

As a journalist who has interviewed lots of these pop star/Disney/Nickelodeon creations, Gomez always struck me as more self-aware and business-savvy than most. But Amanda Bynes seemed mature for her age and probably able to handle an adulthood of lessening fame. Britney Spears always came off as disarming, sweet and naive. So you never know what they’re going through and how they’re handling it.

Anybody who covers these people and poked a head in the door at your kids watching “Wizards of Waverly Place” or “Victorious” is right to wonder just how rough all this will be on these young stars’ psyches and how easily they’ll mature and adjust to adult life, with or without ongoing stardom.

With her still-teenaged girl-growl, cherubic cheeks and sitcom training, I was tickled when Gomez landed “Only Murders,” an ensemble vehicle that played to her strengths and suggested, at least, that she’d found her way through that grownup door.

Knowing what she has to know about the shelf-life of “girl singer” pop starlets, one wonders why she’s still determined to make her mark in a field where she is, at best, just another pretty face and passable voice in the crowd. Is she worried that this is what keeps her “brand” viable?

As refreshingly direct and self-aware as Gomez can come off in the film, can she not hear how “young” she still seems and sounds and will probably always sound? Can she not see how her concert performances underscore that “teen idol” image she seems hellbent on shaking?

And as insecure as she admits she is, why is she letting herself be talked into hanging on to this corner of her business model if “it’s killed me?” It’s the only thing about this together-young-woman that seems almost self-destructive. Intentional omissions from her struggle come off as childish and petty.

That is the picture that she wants to present here. But as much sympathy as she deserves, Keshishian’s film doesn’t find nearly enough drama in Gomez’s crises to separate this musician profile doc from the many others we’ve seen about Katy Perry and a legion of others over the decades. The point of view is too narrow, the “outside” voices entirely star-approved insiders.

At least “My Mind & Me” is more ambitious and revealing than the insipid infomercials that Justin Bieber has fed the public over the years. So she’s got that going for her. But we can see and she should know that’s not enough.

Rating: R (profanity)

Cast: Selena Gomez

Credits: Directed by Alek Keshishian, scripted by Alek Keshishian and Paul Marchand. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:36

Mark it on your calendar. Here it comes. Surely this’ll be the last, right?

The lady of the house has been through trauma or some sort. It’s wrecking her sleep and gutting her short term memory. All the medication in the world is no help.

Then Diana shows up. Christine doesn’t remember hiring a Filipina cook, maid and and care-giver. But Diana is all smiles, all-in and ready to be of service.

“I can help you, Christine.”

And sure enough, she can. With a few herbs burned as incense, an incantation over hair and nail trimmings, and even a dash of tickling, Diana can feel her humanity coming back, a children’s clothing designer whose zest for work returns with the childhood mantra she repeats before any big meeting.

“Lovely shoes, lovely shoes, make me win and never lose!”

Sure, Diana’s offering a “different kind of medicine.” But it works. No harm in that, right?

“Nocebo” is a tidy and tight-as-a-tick thriller about a woman who wonders what is real and what isn’t in a life that’s coming off the rails, until her live-in help arrives.

It’s a horror movie with a hint of mystery, a chill or two and a dash of pathos. And as the ever-helpful, pushy Diana, Chai Fonacier (“Jesus is Dead”) brings a metallic menace to a role we and the people she comes to work for are meant to treat warily.

What’s her game, and why is she helping this rich woman (Eva Green) and her bratty daughter (Billie Gadsdon), over the objections of the suspicious husband of the house (Mark Strong)?

The Garret Shanley script is just cryptic enough to make us ponder its mystery, but not so clever that we don’t figure out where this is going before the movie’s midpoint.

Sturdy direction, generously chilly sound effects and downbeat and downright sad flashbacks engage us and tell us how Diana gained her “gift,” how it’s been a curse and why she has come to this Irish townhome and this brittle family.

“Nocebo” — a medical term describing the psychological trickery that the mind plays when it expects the worst — never quite sings, never goes as Gothic and over-the-top as one might like and only tugs at the heart when it should tear at it.

The performances, script and tone seem to settle for “menacing” when more terrified reactions are in order. It’s as if everybody here has left things to fate and accepts the horrors to come and refuses to be shocked, just resigned to it.

One and all settle for “watchable” when they could and should have summoned up much more.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Eva Green, Chai Fonacier, Billie Gadsdon and Mark Strong

Credits: Directed by Lorcan Finnegan, scripted by Garret Shanley. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:37

This tale of terror opens Nov. 8.

Harry Turner stars in this Guy and His Ocelot Friend story, which comes to theaters Dec. 21 and hits Amazon streaming shortly thereafter.

Mustafa stands on his mother’s apartment balcony chatting by phone with his wife and children. He can almost see them across the way. We gather that the highlight, for the three kids — 9-and-under — comes at the end of these conversations. That’s when they and their Dad flash the lights of their respective apartments as a nightly message — “I love you.”

They’re separated by a bulldozed field and a wall topped with barbed wire, “200 Meters” and two cultures riven apart and kept that way by the omnipresent strife between Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Writer-director Ameen Nayfeh’s film is a harrowing road picture about a two-household Palestinian family and what the husband and father must do to get to his child’s side when the boy ends up in an Israeli hospital.

Nayfeh makes his feature debut about daily life for a lot of Palestinians, families forced to live apart for better schools and job opportunities, living lives of “permits,” “Israeli ID” and endless checkpoints and road blocks which ordinary people must navigate and endure just to make it through the day.

Nayfeh and his star, Ali Suliman (“The Kingdom,” “Huda’s Salon”), personalize this daily trial by taking us into Mustafa’s simple quest to be by his kid’s side in a hospital in Hadera.

In Mustafa and Salwa, played by Lana Zreik of “Lemon Tree” and “Miral,” we see a loving, bickering and struggling couple who dote on their kids and want what’s best for them. Salwa works two jobs and keeps the kids in a decent school on one side of the wall. Mustafa, a construction worker on the edge of aging out of this backbreaking labor, lives on the Palestinian side, a man who refuses to move, refuses to kowtow to Israel and bristles at anything that would put his life and his children under Israeli control.

“You want Madj (their son) to play with Israeli kids (in Arabic with English subtitles)?” He sees the dangers inherent in a Palestinian boy attending an Israeli school, Israeli soccer camps and the like. One childish fistfight and his world could end.

But weekdays, when they’re apart, Mustafa faces the gauntlet of check points, fingerprint ID, the works, just to work on the crew building another Israeli house.

When his guest-worker ID expires, it all threatens to come undone. There goes the job, the easy access to his family. Even though they can still travel over to see him, this is a fraught situation.

And then the boy is injured in an accident, and Mustafa has to brave the pricy, inconvenient, slow and dangerous “smuggling” route into Israel. He must locate a veteran smuggler, meet his price and hop in a van with other folks who absolutely have to be in Israel, no matter what their “papers” allow.

Nayfeh, whose feature debut comes with some of the same messaging and situations as his short about “The Crossing,” puts an increasingly frustrated Mustafa at the mercy of dallying, cagey and unhurried shadow economy types like Nader (Nabil Al Raee) who has to take his time, fill his van to make a profit and meander up and down back roads towards a point and the right lax-security moment in which he can get his passengers into Israel undetected.

The trip is nerve-wracking and infuriating, with delays planned and unplanned, overly-helpful fellow passengers with lots of questions and offers of bad advice. And then, some German woman (Anna Underberger) shows up with a camera to film her Palestinian friend (Motaz Malhees) as he makes his way to a relative’s wedding in Israel, and things promise to get even more complicated.

Nayfeh maintains suspense via the mystery of exactly how these Palestinian versions of “Coyotes” do their daily work-arounds to get a big chunk of Israel’s illegal workforce on the job.

We fear for Mustafa, his son, his marriage and his sanity as he does something that could get him banned from ever entering Israel again, and cannot instill his sense of the urgency in his situation in anyone around him.

We share his fury at the driver and wary alarm at the German filmmaker/passenger who has shown up and could derail things at any number of junctures and in any number of ways.

Suliman plays the whole movie on simmer, about to boil over with rage, outrage and verge-of-tears frustration. Unterberger gives us a gutsy but naive filmmaker with a sense of mystery and no compunctions about ethical or moral shortcuts.

With every detour, every drive past protesting/threatening Israeli “settlers,” a Netanyahu/Trump billboard, every confrontation and every unplanned stop, we see that “200 Meters” gap growing wider and ponder the fates of those struggling to get to the end of this never-ending journey.

Rating: unrated, some violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ali Suliman, Anna Unterberger, Lana Zreik, Motaz Malhees and Nabil Al Raee

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ameen Nayfeh. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:36

Equal parts funny and forlorn, with a smattering of the violence that always been a sort of Emerald Isle background noise, “The Banshees of Inisherin” is Martin McDonagh’s most Irish film, because it’s a lot like Ireland itself.

Set in isolation, on a treeless island off the Irish coast in the Civil War year of 1923, this parable is about an inexplicable feud that all involved are just going to have to live with, even if its cost is grim self-mutilation and loss. What could be more Irish than that?

The playwright-turned-filmmaker of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” rounds up his “In Bruges” muses Colin Ferrell and Brendan Gleeson for a story that goes back to troubles before “The Troubles,” which the “Seven Psychopaths” filmmaker has hitherto only addressed on the stage (“The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” etc.).

That brief Civil War during the founding of the Irish Republic is close enough for the folks on Inisherin to hear the rattle of rifle fire, the crackle of firing squads and even glimpse at a distance as smoke arises from explosions. It’s not necessarily the theme of this story, but it’s never far away and near enough to feel, if not involve oneself with.

The distance, the blur of 20th century history that informs the viewer makes Irish history seem like one long feud, one violent period indistinguishable from the next, and entirely arbitrary in the fog of memory.

That’s a word Pádraic Súilleabháin (Farrell) may not be able to summon up — “arbitrary” — when he stops down’ta J & J Devine’s Public House for a pint with his mate, Colm Doherty (Gleeson). He’s already tried to fetch the man from in front of his Victrola in his solitary seaside cottage. He’s already wondered to his sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon of “Three Billboards” and “Better Call Saul”) what’s up.

“Have y’been rowing?” “I don’t tink we’been rowing.”

But the pub confirms, in a public setting, what his bookish sister guessed.

“I just don’t like you no more,” the grizzled old redhead growls.

There are no “Banshees” on Inisherin. But if there were, poor pushover Pádraic would ask, badger and beg them for a reason this has happened. Because he bends the publican’s (Pat Shortt) ear, annoys his sister with his persistence, expects answers from the perpetually clueless Dominic (Barry Keogh, of course) and simply will not let the matter drop with Colm, whose many rebuffs let out specific gripes — starting with “aimless talk,” “nice” used as an insult for the insipid, and zeroing in on “feckin’ stoooopid.”

And if Pádraic doesn’t stop with the questioning — of Colm, the priest and everybody else in the village — the ginger fiddler lets him know that he’s going to start lopping off fingers. Not Pádraic’s, but his own.

That’ll show him.

McDonagh is a filmmaker whose movies are always firmly grounded in a sense of place. This film, which started life as the final third of an Aran Islands (stage) trilogy (the aforementioned “Lieutenant of Inishmore” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan”) was filmed on Inishmore, just off Galway on the west of Ireland.

We’re immersed in a world of ancient loose-stone fences separating scores of tiny grazing fields, of modest, tidy houses with no electricity where pets and livestock — Colm’s faithful and very smart dog, Pádraic’s miniature donkey (a scene stealer) — practically have the run of the place.

Mrs. O’Riordan (Bríd Ní Neachtain) doesn’t just traffic in groceries at her general store. She requires gossip as a gratuity. The priest (David Pearse) may come over from Ireland proper for services, but he’s up to date on Colm’s state of mind thanks to the confessional. And nobody likes the local constable (Gary Lydon), Dominic’s dad.

McDonagh brings Irish music into the mix, with Colm’s circle of players joined by eager students of “diddley aye” music from the Irish traditional music mecca of Lisdoonvarna.

And the performances are uniformly fine, with Farrell great at conveying a sort of stupefied, unconsidered guilelessness and Condon providing the film’s “feckin'” fire.

What our playwright/filmmaker doesn’t manage to any great degree is tying all this — directly or clearly — to a larger theme. I’m sensing the eternal and essentially pointless nature of Irish strife, the feuds that will not die and yet serve their purpose, at least in the national soul. But it’s not crystal clear that’s what McDonagh had in mind.

As he drifts into the grisly consequences of this “don’t want to be friends no more” ghosting, we’re reminded of the repellent violence that has been this “dark comedy” specialist’s trademark, and that the brilliant Martin’s never spelled his “message” out as clearly as brother John Michael McDonagh did in his films “The Guard” and “Calvary.”

That said, the “troubles” subtext is as good as any other to hang onto while following our favorite Irish filmmaker into the myopic abyss of Ireland’s romanticized past, an “Unquiet Man” showing us the good, the bad, the green and the diddley aye that shaped our perceptions of the place forevermore, when violence was always a part of a more accurate picture.

Rating: R for language throughout, some violent content and brief graphic nudity.

Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keogh, Gary Lydon, Pat Shortt and Kerry Condon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Martin McDonagh. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:49

Disney+ is where you’ll find this Foundation Myth take on how The Mouse in the House the ho Built was created. Looks good.

Nov. 18.