Being the Weeknd ain't all it's cracked up to be.
That's the big takeaway from "Hurry Up Tomorrow," the Toronto pop superstar's convoluted new psychological thriller, a self-indulgent look at the downside of being a mega-selling act in the midst of a gargantuan stadium tour.
The Weeknd, aka Toronto native Abel Tesfaye, plays himself, the "Blinding Lights" hitmaker and one of the world's most popular recording artists. ("Hurry Up Tomorrow" is also the name of his current album.) On the road, his life is a blur of cocaine, private jets and lonely hotel room hook-ups, and at a show he meets Anima (Jenna Ortega), a crazed fan who is escaping troubles of her own.
We first meet Anima when she's burning down the house of a lover, a bit of a behavioral red flag. Concurrently, Tesfaye is receiving texts and voicemails from a jilted ex, and you're forgiven if you conflate Anima with that jilted ex, for script clarity is not the project's strength.
On tour, Tesfaye is pumped up by his cokehead manager Lee (Barry Keoghan), who delivers motivational messages ("You're not human, you're f鈥攊n' invincible!") when he needs to hear it most. But he's another cog in a machine feeding off Tesfaye's art and stardom, part of a system designed to keep the money flowing at all costs.
There are insights into the haziness and empty highs of touring life, and co-writer and director Trey Edward Shults, the talented filmmaker who made "Krisha" and "Waves," uses dizzying 360-degree pans to capture the whir of travel, backstage partying and onstage performance that gets mashed together from airport to hotel to venue, night after night. There's also a scene where Tesfaye and Amina are eating breakfast at 4 p.m. and she casually mentions that's a personal record. "Really? Not for me," he tells her.
But like HBO's "The Idol," another project where the Weeknd struggled to stretch his musical persona into narrative storytelling, "Hurry Up Tomorrow" is held back by the star himself. He's most comfortable onstage, and the concert footage offers a thrilling perspective of Tesfaye's performance, but in scenes where he's asked to emote and deliver dialogue, he's stilted and jittery, and the emotional climax of the film elicited giggles from an audience full of fans.
"Hurry Up Tomorrow" is an ambitious attempt to dramatize tour life and investigate the mindset of a performer as he's on stage in front of 50,000 fans. But it is dragged down by a lack of emotional connection and the high-wire act of bridging reality and fiction in a way that feels truthful, as if the filmmakers' best intentions were blinded by the lights.