A man of many faces, from the digital mask of anonymity on his mixtape breakout “House of Balloons” to the plastic surgery prosthetics circa “After Hours,” Abel Tesfaye has announced he’ll soon retire the one that made him famous, with his latest album “Hurry Up Tomorrow” his last under The Weeknd moniker. The lyrics situate him at a clear turning point, professionally and personally; the title track, with the usual synths traded for singer/songwriter piano and the plainly stated confession that “I want to change, I want the pain,” signals a transformation for an artist who’s struggled against himself from the jump. The Weeknd discography plays like one big party with noxious vibes, thrown by a hedonist less interested in a good time than numbing the torment of an existence comprising coke-and-sizzurp binges, emotionless supermodel threeways, and morning-afters of bleak reflection.
Tesfaye is now 35, an age at which a lot of people decide it’s high time to get their shit together, and “Hurry Up Tomorrow” (the song, that is) makes a resolution for lasting, meaningful growth through penance and redemption. To presume that this heralds a newfound maturity for the man who not so long ago pulled a “triggered much??” on Rolling Stone would be a mistake, however.
The non-album plank of this grander creative project, a feature film also titled “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” reiterates this career narrative by mapping it onto autofiction at greater length and with bludgeoning obviousness. A viewer may find themselves appreciating how the non-visual element of music allows figurative language to retain some wisp of mystery, whereas onscreen it’s made to wear its significance in blatant, artless ways.
A tortured genius wrestling with their demons, breaking themselves down to nothing, and building themselves back up in a nobler image — these are fine building blocks for drama. “Hurry Up Tomorrow” (again, the song) works well enough along these lines. But when we’re made to watch Tesfaye sing it in its entirety in an unbroken close-up while crying at the beauty of his own music, the introspection turns to simple self-involvement. It would appear he’s trading drugs and alcohol for a form of indulgence less materially harmful to himself, but more so to us.
Tesfaye has found a felicitous collaborator in director Trey Edward Shults, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” (the movie, from here on out) being largely a composite of their past work: the furtive ingesting and narcotized intensity of Shults’ debut “Krisha,” the rage-to-contrition arc and whirling cinematography of his polarizing “Waves,” the volatile maestro/muse dynamic of Tesfaye’s even-more-polarizing HBO series “The Idol.”
The threadbare plot is set in motion when Tesfaye’s screen-self (henceforth referred to as Abel) loses his voice while touring, a real-life incident forced here into heavy-handed metaphor as an existential ailment symptomatic of his deeper issues with himself and women. (Tellingly, Riley Keough plays both his absent mother and the ex-girlfriend he keeps screaming at on the phone.) Just as his deteriorating health and pressure from his pal-turned-manager (Barry Keoghan) push him to the verge of collapse, he finds hope of salvation in the same place as many misogynists, with a woman who has not yet started to annoy him. Brief eye contact and about a dozen words are all Abel and the enigmatic Anima (Jenna Ortega) need to establish a connection closer than garden-variety groupie-ism.
Until, of course, the morning after, when she starts up with her talk about joining him on tour and inserting herself into his life. The ensuing conflict between them takes an abrupt turn into a hotel-room two-hander as Anima fastens Abel to a bed and coerces him into confronting his feelings by playing his own music to him and dispensing shallow insights about how his songs’ upbeat melodies belie their cry-for-help content.
While her wiggly dancing and superficial pop-crit commentary nod to “American Psycho,” this final stretch reckoning with Abel’s toxicity and death drives could be compared unfavorably to anything from early Almodóvar to “Phantom Thread,” dulling the provocative edges on a long and august tradition of psychosexual pas de deux. Neither its methods nor conclusions feel subversive; the conceptual thinness of the specter-like Anima and the role she plays in Abel’s evolution both amend his admission of guilt with the concession that women are indeed exacting, unreliable, and/or psychotic.
If all this — or the brief dream sequence visited by an Inuit child, or the drug-fueled freakout in front of a projection of Lotte Reiniger’s proto-animation landmark “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” — piques curiosity on paper, that’s only because reading a review of a film doesn’t occupy nearly as much time as watching it. The minutes drag, and not just when Shults holds on interminable long takes giving actors in need of guardrails far too much room to fail.
Tesfaye and Ortega model two opposing modes of imitative, hollow performance, like a bad actor’s varying notions of good acting. A devout student of the European classics (she took this role in part for a “Possession” homage sequence all but excised in the final cut), Ortega knows that great thespians are stoic and inexpressive, but doesn’t understand how or why. Constantly pumping himself up with shadowboxing and yelling at women, Tesfaye is doing De Niro in “Raging Bull,” just without the Method behind his mannerisms. Meanwhile, the avant-garde-101 padding makes lemons from the flights of expressionistic fancy in “Lemonade,” while the musical sequences clarify that this is no mere album accessory by being repetitive, unimaginative, and scant.
The thing about vanity projects this narcissistic is at the very least, even in calamity, they’re supposed to be interesting. Tesfaye has the makings of a fascinating yet flawed figure, equal parts egotistical and insecure, self-aggrandizing and self-effacing, at once a mad king and wounded child. Since the days of sampling Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Beach House, he’s been forthcoming about his eclectic, well-curated tastes. But for a personal statement uncompromised by commercial purpose, it’s bland and indistinct, and for a howl from the depths of a soul in agony, there’s very little at risk in its vague baring of sin or broad overtures to rebirth.
One yearns for idiosyncrasy, a stroke of the unknowable, some transmission from a plane of inspiration inaccessible to ordinary mortals. If the unbearable weight of massive talent is really so crazy-making, that unwieldy creativity should be set free, however messy. Or, if I can just say what I mean: making audiences feel nostalgic about Kanye West? In this cultural economy?
Grade: D
Lionsgate will release “Hurry Up Tomorrow” in theaters on Friday, May 16.
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