It’s a very straight biopic, with Gwilym Lee in particular doing a superb Brian May impression, but the plaudits have to belong to Rami Malek, who simply becomes Freddie Mercury in an extraordinary performance. But the film takes us from the beginnings of the band to Live Aid gradually, missing out what has to be missed out for time reasons but showing us an awful lot. The focus is on Freddie, of course, from the racism he experienced in his youth to his relationship with his Parsee Zoroastrian family to the decadence to a dramatically impactful AIDS diagnosis just before Live Aid, using artistic licence to ignore the fact he wasn’t actually diagnosed until 1987, but rightly so. Other highlights include Mike Myers as the man who lost Queen, and the ambiguous relationship between Freddie and Mary which is played for pathos here.
The film has been criticised, not without justice, for portraying Freddie’s gay lifestyle as a decadent distraction, and it’s certaibly odd to see the excess and partying as something quite divorced from rock ‘n’ roll. But perhaps we should be careful to necessarily equate promiscuity and the leather subculture of the time with being gay. It’s still a hard criticism to answer, though.
This film isn’t particularly deep or meaningful; it’s a straightforward rock biopic, with the facts reshaped for medidramatic effect and for an emotional finish, but it’s very well done and the sort of rock biopic that needs to exist. I rather enjoyed it.
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