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Review: In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Freddie Mercury Is More Interesting Than His Music

bohemian rhapsody movie review new york times

It may be that the only way to experience a full measure of Queen nostalgia is not to have heard the band the first time around—to indulge in vicarious nostalgia, a homecoming to somebody else’s home. If so, “ Bohemian Rhapsody ,” a superficially clichéd yet thematically unusual bio-pic about the band’s lead singer and guiding spirit, Freddie Mercury ( Rami Malek ), delivers that secondhand rock memory by rooting its story less in the primary experience of the band’s performances than in a subtly revisionist, sharply current view of Mercury’s life and work. The movie has been criticized for its lack of attention to the specifics of his sex life. In fact, it is clear about Mercury’s sexual orientation. (In the movie, Freddie—as we’ll call the character, to distinguish him from the historical Mercury—states that he’s bisexual and is shown to be in two long-term relationships with men, though it only hints at any casual ones.) But “Bohemian Rhapsody” isn’t a comprehensive bio-pic, nor a full-spectrum consideration of Mercury’s life—it is a clearly and carefully oriented vision of his career. It’s mostly interested in his private life in relation to a single big idea: success and its price.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” offers nothing of Mercury’s childhood in Zanzibar, his schooling in Bombay, his lifelong devotion to rock and roll. The movie shows no years of dedicated practice or earlier musical life or ambition; his sole primordial effort is a song that he scribbles on a piece of paper and keeps folded up in his pocket while working, as a young man in London, as an airport baggage handler. Mercury, who played piano and guitar, is of course depicted as being possessed of a formidable vocal technique, a remarkable near-operatic voice—but it’s presented as a natural gift that’s also a curse. He was born, as Freddie says, with four extra incisors, and the larger oral chamber is the reason for his large vocal range. Freddie first shows off that range in a parking lot outside a club, where he’s trying to get members of a local band to take one of his songs. But the band has just lost its lead singer, and so Freddie does a spontaneous audition for them—not, however, before they make fun of his facial deformity and suggest that it’s an insurmountable obstacle to his becoming a band member, let alone its front man.

A protruding mouth isn’t the only trait for which Freddie endures insults. Born Farrokh Bulsara, he’s an ethnic Parsi, a descendant of the Zoroastrians who fled Persia for India more than a millennium ago; in Great Britain, he’s frequently insulted as a “Paki.” (At his airport job, he meekly replies that he’s not from Pakistan.) He’s also a bisexual man in a country that had only recently decriminalized homosexuality, at a time when it was widely considered shameful, or at least indecent. And he’s from a poor family whose struggles he relates to discrimination. In one of the movie’s exemplary scenes, Freddie is at home with his parents, planning an escape into music (and declaring that his name is no longer his given one of Farrokh but, rather, Freddie); his father instead preaches to him a credo, exhorting him to pursue “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Freddie’s retort isn’t a variation on “boring”—it’s, “And how has that worked out for you?” His father’s virtuous modesty hasn’t brought success in the face of prejudice; Freddie’s bold self-assertion is meant to do so.

When the band’s music begins to crystallize, Freddie masterminds its path to success. He decides that the band should sell its van to finance the recording of an album, and, in the studio, he orchestrates its production as well as the unusual studio techniques with which they create it. He gives the band the new name of Queen; he arranges the crucial meeting, with Elton John’s manager (Aidan Gillen), that will put the band on the map; and, at that meeting, he sells the manager on the band’s future hit-making successes. The scene offers Freddie one of the script’s great arias, on the subject of his ambitions, as he tells the businessman that he’s playing “for the outcasts in the back” because those are the people with whom he himself identifies.

The direction of the film (credited to Bryan Singer, who was fired late in the production and replaced by Dexter Fletcher but is granted sole credit) is often oddly denatured, flip, and incurious, and its lack of vision keeps the movie far short of its—and, above all, of Malek’s—finest inspirations. (The filming of Malek’s onstage performances as Freddie, which are chopped to bits and reduced to cliché-riddled snippets, is particularly insensitive.) But at its best the film is spare and clarifying, and ideologically unambiguous: its strength is in the positioning of Mercury as an artist who confronts opposition throughout society—including from the very institutions that he needs in order to succeed. The script offers Freddie another great aria to deliver, to a record-company executive (played by Mike Myers), in which he declares his ambition to make music with the power of opera, “the wit of Shakespeare, the unbridled joy of musical theatre,” intending to offer “something for everyone.” “We’ll speak in tongues if we want to,” he says. The song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which the record company hesitated to record and then wouldn’t issue as a single, of course became a hit, at which point the movie offers a remarkable montage featuring quotes from reviews of the song, all negative. The very source of Freddie’s popularity—his keen insight into the humiliations and the frustrations of listeners, their strivings and their dreams, their search for love and visions of stifled grandeur—made him rich, famous, and artistically fulfilled, but critically derided.

For that matter, it’s only in those moments of performance, of communion with people who, each in their own way, share his sense of oppression and humiliation, that Freddie feels himself to be truly himself. His joy in performance is a joy in solidarity, and his life offstage can hardly match it. (He speaks of his partying life as a quest for distraction from the “in-between moments” when “the darkness comes back in” and, later, explains his drug use: “Being human is a condition that requires a little anesthesia.”) Yet for his success he’s not just beloved—he’s also subjected to the aggressive prying of gossip-mongers and paparazzi, the brickbats of critics, and the betrayal of intimates. And then he discovers that he’s sick; he’s diagnosed with AIDS ; he realizes that he’s dying.

More than most bio-pics (more than most movies), “Bohemian Rhapsody” is carried by the performance of its lead actor, because Malek offers more than a skillful impersonation—he offers an imaginative interpretation. Malek does an impressive job of re-creating Mercury’s moves onstage, but the core of the performance is Malek’s intensely thoughtful, insight-rich channelling of Mercury’s hurt, his alienation and isolation even at the height of his fame. While watching the movie, I found his performance eerily reminiscent, as if based less on Freddie Mercury himself than on some other movie actor’s performance. Then it struck me: Malek wasn’t just channelling hurt; he was channelling Hurt—Malek’s quiet and nearly abashed delivery of lines, in a way that emphasizes both Freddie’s extra teeth and the emotional effect of being singled out for them, reminded me of John Hurt’s performance as John Merrick, in David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man.”

Still, for all its pain, the movie is about the virtue and the quality that inhere in success. It displays rock music as the one place where a total outsider such as Mercury could completely belong. The movie “Bohemian Rhapsody” evokes a Warholian concept of success, of commercial and mainstream success as a personal statement, a mode of artistic expression. Criticize the music’s simplistic emotions, earworm hooks, instant clichés, and crowd-pleasing exhortations as much as you’d like, the movie suggests, but don’t misunderstand it as insincere or inartistic, as selling out or pandering. Freddie, as depicted, aims at commerce with a dead-set sense of purpose and principle.

What’s more, Freddie’s work is, in the movie’s view, as sincere in its synthetic aspects as it is in its plain ones. In this regard, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is also a virtual rebuke to the veneration of the singer-songwriter as seen in Bradley Cooper’s version of “ A Star Is Born ” (which regrettably dismisses the very kind of persona-crafting that is central to Lady Gaga’s own art). Freddie is certainly both a songwriter and a singer, but he’s also a persona from the start, whose elaborately crafted masquerades are as central to his creative personality as is his vocal and instrumental self-presentation. (Whether Mercury’s work matches a Warholian originality of artistic form is debatable, though the movie comes down strongly in favor, as in the episodic oddity of the song “Bohemian Rhapsody.”)

The movie “Bohemian Rhapsody” makes the case that Mercury is more interesting than his music—and, by extension, that popularity itself, the ability to become a mainstream star and hitmaker, is itself no fluke or by-product but a conscious creation and a mark of genius. The movie’s vision of Mercury’s life embodies a phrase by Stendhal cited by Nietzsche in “ Beyond Good and Evil ”: “A banker who has made a fortune has a part of the character that’s needed to make discoveries in philosophy, that is, to see clearly into what is.” Freddie, the movie suggests, wrote, sang, produced, and performed, from his constrained and petty life, from his multiple public and private oppressions and humiliations, all the way to the bank.

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“Bohemian Rhapsody” Is the Least Orgiastic Rock Bio-Pic

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There's a scene in "Bohemian Rhapsody" I keep coming back to, because it's symbolic of the film's problems, not just with its presentation of Queen, but of Freddie Mercury, the legendary lead singer and the greatest frontman of all time. (I'd say "arguably" but for me there's no argument.) One night, Freddie Mercury (an extraordinary Rami Malek ), missing the excitement of touring, throws a costume ball in his mansion. Dressed in an ermine cloak and a crown, he swings through the crowd, made up of men in various degrees of fabulous drag. The other members of Queen—lead guitarist Brian May ( Gwilym Lee ), drummer Roger Taylor ( Ben Hardy ), and bassist John Deacon ( Joseph Mazzello )—sit together, visibly uncomfortable. Freddie greets them rapturously, and one of them says stiffly, "This isn't really our scene, Freddie." Later that night, Freddie hits on a waiter named Jim ( Aaron McCusker ), who rebuffs him, saying, "Call me when you like yourself."

The more I think about this scene—the problems of which could fill an entire dissertation—the angrier I get. "Bohemian Rhapsody"—written by Anthony McCarten (" The Theory of Everything ", " Darkest Hour ") and directed by Bryan Singer (with uncredited director Dexter Fletcher , who took over after Singer was fired)—wants me to watch the costume ball scene and think, "Wow, I'm scared for Freddie. Freddie needs the stability of his (married, straight) band members to counteract the SUPER gay world he's living in." I struggled with this scene, I tried to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. But what's onscreen is what is intended. We are meant to side with the band members, we are meant to look at Freddie with the same discomfort about him acting so, well, gay. It's unforgivable.

Opening and closing with Queen's triumphant performance at Live Aid in 1985, the film shows (sort of) the transformation of shy buck-toothed Farrokh Bulsara, the closeted son of Parsis parents, into the strutting swaggering Freddie Mercury. Freddie is shown approaching a band he likes backstage at a club in London. They just lost their lead singer, and Mercury has written a song he wants to show them. Next thing you know, he makes his debut with them, and, except for one catcall of "Paki," Freddie and his flamboyant movements goes over really well. Next thing you know, they're Queen, and they're touring the world. In the film, their artistic journey is boiled down into on-the-nose statements like, "We'll mix genres and cross boundaries!" Do rock stars speak like this? The genesis of some of their biggest hits—"Bohemian Rhapsody," "Another One Bites the Dust," "We Will Rock You"—are treated in a cursory manner, with very little insight provided into an actual creative process.

Biopics tend towards the "sensational," making the mistake of thinking that the most interesting thing about James Brown , for example, is his personal life, when why we care about James Brown is his music. " I Saw the Light " was far more interested in Hank Williams' drug addiction than in what he actually did in country music that was so groundbreaking. Some films—like " Love & Mercy " and " I'm Not There "—move away from the biopic approach altogether, and attempt to grapple with the subject matter as artists . The artistic commentary in "Bohemian Rhapsody" tends towards a knowing wink-wink at the audience. "Nobody wants to listen to a six-minute opera song with words like 'Galileo' in it!," cries one record label executive (played by Mike Myers in a bit of meta-casting, calling up the "Bohemian Rhapsody" scene in " Wayne's World .")

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign. However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign. The tensions of being a gay man in the 1970s are not handled, or even addressed. He himself seems unaware of his own sexual desires. He falls in love with Mary Austin ( Lucy Boynton ), and looks shocked and disturbed when a trucker gives him a seductive side-eye at a restroom in middle America. (Fade to black. We never see what happened next.) Later, Mary says to him, "You're gay, Freddie," and he responds, "I think I'm bisexual." That's as far as the conversation goes. The film is rated PG-13, so there's not much sex in it anyway, but he's shown in a romantic context only with Mary.

There's no other word for this approach than phobic. The relationship with Mary was hugely important to Mercury (he left his estate to her in his will), but the subtleties of the situation and the context of what it would mean to "come out" in the 1970s are not explored at all. The script makes it seem like Mercury had no desires for homosexual sex until Paul Prenter ( Allen Leech ) came along and showed him the way.

Paul, manipulative, cunning, controlling, lures Mercury into the gay underworld of leather clubs and orgies, far away from the goodness, the wholesomeness, that is the rest of Queen. Prenter—who also died of AIDS in 1991—eventually gave very damaging interviews following his breakup with Mercury. But "Bohemian Rhapsody" shows no interest in contextualizing what Paul, a self-described "queer Catholic boy from North Belfast," may have represented to the closeted Mercury, why Freddie was drawn to him. Maybe Freddie was sick of hanging out with his straight married friends and needed some "gay time." Nobody knew AIDS was coming. The people in those clubs weren't just biding their time in an orgy of self-loathing until a biblical plague was visited upon them. They were having a blast . A long-overdue blast. But you'd never know that from the film. "Bohemian Rhapsody" views Paul as a villain and AIDS as a punishment.

None of this is the fault of Rami Malek, whose imitation of Mercury goes beyond the famously prominent teeth. He taps into Mercury's ferocious energy, particularly in the concert sequences, all of which give you the electric sense of what it might have been like to be there in person. The single star of this review is for Malek's performance.

The film's reluctance to deal with Mercury's sexuality is catastrophic because his sexuality is so connected to the art of Queen that the two cannot be separated out. Refusing to acknowledge queerness as an artistic force—indeed, to point at it and suggest that this is where Mercury went astray—is a deep disservice to Mercury, to Queen, to Queen fans, and to potential Queen fans. Genius doesn't emerge from a vacuum. Mercury was made up of all of the tensions and passions in his life: he loved Elvis, opera, music hall, costumes, Victorian England ... and, yes, sex. Lots of it. Sexual expression equals liberation, and you can feel the exhilaration of that in Mercury's once-in-a-generation voice. You cannot discuss Freddie Mercury without discussing the queer sensibility driving him, the queer context in which he operated. Or, you can try, as this film does, but you will fail.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content and language.

135 minutes

Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury

Gwilym Lee as Brian May

Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor

Joseph Mazzello as John Deacon

Lucy Boynton as Mary Austin

Aidan Gillen as John Reid

Tom Hollander as Jim Beach

Mike Myers as Ray Foster

Bryan Singer

Writer (story by)

Peter Morgan
Anthony McCarten

Cinematographer

Newton Thomas Sigel
John Ottman

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Film Review: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’

Rami Malek does a commanding job of channeling Freddie Mercury's flamboyant rock-god bravura, but Bryan Singer's middle-of-the-road Queen biopic rarely lives up to the authenticity of its lead performance.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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Freddie Mercury was the most majestically debauched of all rock stars. A bad-boy diva with a famous overbite that made him look not just sexy but libidinous, he strutted around onstage with the come-hither flamboyance of a leering vampire prince. And, of course, no one in rock history had pipes like his. In his heyday as the lead singer of Queen , during the mid-to-late 1970s, Mercury crooned and wailed, but more than that he soared , like Robert Plant fused with the spirits of Cher and Tina Turner. He was as down-and-dirty as any rock ‘n’ roller, but his melodic glide could lift you to the heavens. Queen’s iconic anthem “We Will Rock You” was written as a call-and-response between the band and its fans, but the way Mercury sang it, with his snaky grandiloquence (“Buddy, you’re a boy, make a big noise playing in the street…” ) the song came off as his unholy credo. The message was: He will rock you.

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Onstage, Malek’s Freddie is a studded leather peacock, swoony and liberated, letting the life force pour out of him in a glorious tremolo, most extraordinarily during the film’s climactic sequence, a song-for-song, move-for-move reenactment of Queen’s legendary reunion set at the London Live Aid concert in 1985 (though the film drops the infectious Elvis bop of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”). Malek, wearing a wife beater and arm band and Mercury’s signature honcho mustache, with liquid dark eyes that drink in the crowd and stare it down, struts and poses and leads the audience in vocal chants as if he owned the world (which, at that moment, Freddie sort of did).

Offstage, Malek nails the star’s fusion of charm and ego with a suavely nervy command. Freddie, born in Zanzibar (as Farrokh Bulsara), spends the early scenes, set in London in 1970, toggling between his proper Parsi family and the nightlife that lures him like a flame. When he learns that Smile, a local band he’s been following, has lost its lead singer, he belts out an impromptu croon in front of the band’s other members, guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), just outside their club gig, and as soon as they hear what Freddie can do they hire him.

He already has the scarf-tossing pansexual darling bravado of a post-glam rock star, yet Freddie, in his way, is also a tea-time British gentleman. He becomes the band’s leader, renaming them Queen and getting them to sell their rickety touring van to make enough money for a demo tape, and he possesses an awesome belief in his own talent — right down to the four extra teeth on his upper jaw, which he proudly claims add to his vocal power. Yet the way Malek plays him, there’s a captivating sweetness to Freddie. He treats everyone with the same soft-edged, velvet-voiced regard (at least, until he becomes a drugged-out rock-star prima donna), notably Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), the playful and loving lass he falls for and forms a tender domestic union with. When he struggles to keep the relationship going after he discovers, on the road, that his essential attraction is to men, it’s not just because he’s concealing his erotic drive (though that’s part of it). It’s as though he can’t bring himself to break Mary’s heart.

So with a performance as commanding as Rami Malek’s at its center, why isn’t “Bohemian Rhapsody” a better movie? Directed by Bryan Singer , who is now officially credited (after rumors that his name might be taken off the picture due to his failure to show up on set during the final weeks of filming late last year), the movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them. And it treats Freddie’s personal life — his sexual-romantic identity, his loneliness, his reckless adventures in gay leather clubs — with kid-gloves reticence, so that even if the film isn’t telling major lies, you don’t feel you’re fully touching the real story either. Freddie Mercury was a brazenly sexual person who felt compelled to keep his sexuality hidden, but that’s no excuse for a movie about him to be so painfully polite.

As a director, Singer has always been a big-budget short-order cook, the kind of filmmaker who brings more energy than texture to what he’s doing. “Bohemian Rhapsody” creates a watchable paint-by-numbers ride through the Queen saga, yet it’s rarely the movie it could or should have been. As scripted by Anthony McCarten (“Darkest Hour,” “The Theory of Everything”), it lacks the cathartic intimacy, the rippingly authentic you-are-there excitement of a great rock-world biopic like “Sid and Nancy” or “Get On Up” or “Love & Mercy.” Yet the film’s limitations may not end up mattering all that much, since its once-over-lightly quality could prove to be highly commercial (and Malek’s captivating performance is pure awards bait). The movie can work for mainstream audiences as a jukebox musical pegged to a heart-tugging semi-synthetic version of Freddie Mercury’s rise and fall.

In a strange way, it’s Queen’s music, delectable as it is, that’s most underserved by Singer’s one-thing-after-another sketchbook approach. In terms of the Queen songbook, the movie gets a few things wonderfully right, like the Live Aid performance, or the recording — and marketing — of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the one-of-a-kind existential rock-opera mash-up (“Nothing really matters..to me” ) that, in 1975, became Queen’s signature six-minute radio masterpiece. The marathon recording session exuberantly evokes the song’s shoot-the-works quality, and there’s an irresistible sequence, built around the in-joke of casting Mike Myers — yes, Wayne Campbell himself — as an EMI executive, in which the members of Queen try, and fail, to convince the label to release “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a single. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yet for all the attention it lavishes on its title song, “Bohemian Rhapsody” doesn’t show much interest in how Freddie and Queen came together to carve out their heavy-metal/pop-echo-chamber wall of sound. The first true Queen single, “Killer Queen,” in 1974, becomes the occasion for a squabble between the band members and the producers of “Top of the Pops” about why the band has to lip-sync their performance of it on television. But even if that really happened, who cares? What we miss is how the band came up with “Killer Queen” in the first place — the merging of Mercury’s Tin Pan Alley jauntiness and Brian May’s guitar-god power, backed by the insane multi-tracking of Mercury’s voice into an infinitely mirrored chorus. That’s the invention of the Queen sound, and it’s barely an afterthought in the movie.

As much as that, we miss the formation of what Freddie was onstage. Partly because the film doesn’t want to upstage the Live Aid sequence, there’s hardly a moment where we see Freddie discover who he is as a performer. And here’s why that’s a crucial omission. It wouldn’t be homophobic — in fact, it would be homophobic to deny — that Freddie Mercury brought a spark of gay sensibility to rock ‘n’ roll. He envisioned the concert stage, and the recording studio, as a thunder-rock cabaret, and his vocals projected a newly naked male emotionalism that was stunning in its larger-than-life intensity.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” has a good time showing how Queen conceived a handful of their iconic hits, from the ominous funk of “Another One Bites the Dust” to the gladiatorial surge of “We Are the Champions.” But for most of the film, the awesome expressiveness of Freddie Mercury, the way he used his voice as an enraptured instrument of agony and ecstasy, isn’t front and center. It’s telling that Queen’s 1976 single “Somebody to Love” isn’t featured in the movie (it’s just background music), because not only is it one of their greatest songs, it’s one of Mercury’s most ardently autobiographical. It could have been an epiphany — but the film backs away from it, because it’s backing away from the emotional bravura of what Freddie Mercury was singing.

As “Bohemian Rhapsody” goes on, the band falls apart and comes back together in inevitable, if not always historically accurate, melodramatic ways. The camaraderie among the members of Queen is fun to behold, because the film captures what different cloths they were cut from, and the actors fill in their roles — Gwilym Lee is especially good as Brian May, with his Louis XIV mane, virtuoso guitar licks, and jovial straight-arrow crispness. When Freddie reveals to the band, during rehearsals for the Live Aid show, that he has HIV (even though he wasn’t, in fact, diagnosed until two years later), it’s moving, because at that moment the film touches the truth of all great rock bands: that they’re brothers. Freddie’s Live Aid performance gets reconfigured into his secret way of fighting back against the disease. He’s sick, with an ailing throat, but he looks and performs as though he’s in his prime, a show-must-go-on mirage that’s a testament to his rock ‘n’ roll fervor. In a sequence like that, “Bohemian Rhapsody” nails Queen’s majesty. What eludes the film is Freddie Mercury’s mystery.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, New York, Oct. 7, 2018. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 135 MIN.

Production: A 20th Century Fox release of a 20th Century Fox, New Regency, GK Films, Queen Films production. Producers: Jim Beach, Graham King. Executive producers: Dexter Fletcher, Aaron Milchan, Denis O’Sullivan, Jane Rosenthal.
Crew: Director: Bryan Singer. Screenplay: Anthony McCarten. Camera (color, widescreen): Newton Thomas Sigel. Editor: John Ottman. Music: John Ottman.
With: Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joseph Mazzello, Aidan Gillen, Tom Hollander, Allen Leech, Mike Myers, Aaron McCusker, Dermot Murphy.

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‘bohemian rhapsody’: film review.

Rami Malek stars as Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' a biopic tracing the British rock quartet's first 15 years.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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Extra incisors — that’s how a young Freddie Mercury, played with magnetism and breathtaking physicality by Rami Malek , explains his four-octave vocal range to prospective bandmates. The moment arrives early in Bohemian Rhapsody , a film that doesn’t share Mercury’s surfeit of incisors; it has none. Which is not to say this conventional, PG-13 portrait of an unconventional band offers nothing to chew on. Or that it doesn’t acknowledge the tale’s darker facets. It does, ever so lightly, all the while fervently emphasizing what’s sweet and upbeat about it. Someday another feature about Queen might go deeper. That might or might not make for a better movie. Who says every rock ‘n’ roll biopic has to wallow in Behind the Music confessionals?

The involvement of bandmembers Brian May and Roger Taylor, as consultants and executive music producers, has more than a little to do with the gentle sheen that tamps down unruly narrative possibilities. But their involvement also amps the material’s musical authenticity. To the filmmakers’ credit, and even though they don’t entirely avoid the clunky factoid-itis that often plagues the genre, this is a biopic that favors sensory experience over exposition. It understands what pure, electrifying fun rock ‘n’ roll can be.

Release date: Nov 02, 2018

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Bohemian Rhapsody movie review: A killer Queen biopic indeed

Rami Malek's bravura performance as Freddie Mercury just won him an Oscar.

Patrick's play The Cowboy is included in the Best American Short Plays 2011-12 anthology. He co-wrote and starred in the short film Baden Krunk that won the Best Wisconsin Short Film award at the Milwaukee Short Film Festival.

Bohemian Rhapsody, which won four Academy Awards awards Sunday night , chronicles the rise of the band Queen , and appropriately focuses on lead singer Freddie Mercury . But this isn't a cradle-to-grave biography. It covers 15 years of Queen's rise and comeback and it's as much a concert as it is a biopic -- especially while showcasing the band's performance at Live Aid , a global charity concert in 1985 that raised money to fight hunger in Ethiopia.

Even before Bohemian Rhapsody begins, the 20th Century Fox logo appears on screen and the familiar trumpet fanfare morphs into an electric guitar with Queen-like flourishes. It's kind of like the logo is telling you to get ready to rock, there will be head-banging. When is the last time a non-comic-book-movie logo got cheers before a film?

At the screening I attended at San Francisco's famed Castro Theater, people were mouthing lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody -- like you do -- and clapping their hands along to " Radio GaGa ." There are so many Queen songs featured in the film it's worth seeing it just to hear the music over theater speakers. I can't remember another music biopic with as much music as this.

The other reason to see Bohemian Rhapsody is Rami Malek' s bravura performance as Freddie Mercury, which won him a Golden Globe and Academy Award. It's hard to imagine anyone being able to play the truly unique Mercury, with his high cheekbones, endless jawline and, of course, those teeth.

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Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury performing Ay-Oh at Live Aid.

Looking like Mercury is one thing, but being able to perform like him is quite another. Enter Malek , who plays Elliot Alderson on Mr. Robot . He doesn't look exactly like Mercury, but embodies him head to toe. His performance carries the film, and is filled with heart even in some of Mercury's darker moments.

On stage, Malek is outlandish, flirty and mesmerizing as he swaggers and preens with the real Mercury's confidence. His angular stance and press of vocals beam out of his spandex-covered frame like a bright light to the heavens. And that's just as Mercury on stage .

Malek is adept at portraying both the rock star and the person. In the scenes between Mercury and Mary Austin, his closest friend and partner (played by Lucy Boynton ), you see a vulnerable side to Mercury, driven by a search for identity as much as ambition. (Hey, iconic rock stars are just like us.)

Without Mary, as the film shows, Mercury might not have fully explored his talent or come to terms with his sexuality. Boynton brings a contemporary perspective to Mary that allows her to be a supportive muse, partner and friend who has enough emotional strength to show Mercury who he really is, even as he breaks her heart with his philandering.

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Gwilym Lee (left) as Brian May and Rami Malek (right) as Freddie Mercury performing Fat Bottomed Girls.

But the other part of Freddie Mercury is as lead singer of Queen. Legendary guitarist Brian May is wonderfully played by Gwilym Lee under a mop of curls, Ben Hardy plays drummer Roger Taylor and Joe Mazzello plays bass guitarist John Deacon.

Some of my favorite scenes are when the four of them are recording a song. You see as much of the foursome's creativity as you do their bickering. One of the better sequences is the band recording " Bohemian Rhapsody " in a studio on a farm. There's a moment when Mercury writes the lyrics that's part act of creation and part divine inspiration. It's just him alone at a piano in a farmhouse with his raw emotions and natural talent on full display.

The story has obvious parallels to other music biopics , maybe because so many famous musicians' lives follow the same path: start out as a nobody; find love and success; struggle with stardom, sexual adventures, drugs; lose yourself to fame; grow apart from those close to you; and make a comeback. Also, as is the case here, there's the tragic ending.

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The band records "Another One Bites The Dust."

Mercury died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991 . It was a "where were you when" moment only heightened by the fact that at that time, awareness and understanding of HIV/AIDS was still in its infancy. Just the day before his death, the very private performer shared publicly that he had the disease.

The sense of Mercury's tragic end creeps up on you from the first frame of the film, a silent close-up on his eyes. It's not clear what the context is here, but there's enough ambiguity that makes you fear the worst. The knowledge of Mercury's illness and death is a like another character in the film whose presence is barely seen but often left me feeling dread is around the corner.

But as that short silent beginning ends, " Somebody to Love " kicks in and we glimpse Mercury walking past all his cats feasting from fancy bowls to leave his mansion for that famous Live Aid concert. Mercury is in his full-on Castro clone look with short, slicked hair and large, bushy mustache.

Despite languishing in development limbo for years, with various attached stars and directors (and not without controversy ), the film that came out of such a messy creative process is phenomenal. It doesn't deserve to be overshadowed by off screen in-fighting, and director Dexter Fletcher (credited as executive producer) deserves praise for his work in the final weeks of filming.

The film is gorgeously shot by cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel , a frequent collaborator with Bryan Singer , credited as the film's director. Sigel captures the band performing as authentically as he does the tiny mundane moments between shows. I love the way he frames Malek on and off.

As for the wardrobe, throughout the film I heard various audience members/numerous viewers say, "Oh, I want that shirt" or "I need those shoes." Malek's clothes as Mercury are necessarily, gloriously over the top. The film's a master class in rock star costume design.

Mike Myers is nearly unrecognizable as EMI executive Ray Foster. His presence in the film is wonderfully cheeky especially since Wayne's World was one of the reasons Bohemian Rhapsody had a resurgence .

Bohemian Rhapsody, much like the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton did for NWA, will introduce Queen to a new audience while easily elevating the band's rock god status even higher. Even under all that hype, the film is about four outsiders who made a bunch of fantastic music.

As Mercury says: "We're four misfits who don't belong together playing for the other misfits."

First published, Nov. 3, 2018. Update, Feb. 25 at 10:05 a.m.: Adds the film's four Oscar wins.

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Read here for every way you can watch Bohemian Rhapsody .

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‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ | Film Review

Bohemian Rhapsody tells the dramatised history of the influential British rock band, Queen, with the limelight focused firmly on the late frontman, Freddie Mercury.

I may like electronic or industrial music now, and I may have listened to little but Paul Simon as a kid, but the music of Queen joined the dots for me at every stage of growing up. They taught me about pushing boundaries and finding my place, about being myself and about connection with others. Queen kept me company when I was homesick, and Freddie… well, he was a model – if ever I needed one – that it doesn’t have to matter what others think.

So despite booking tickets for the opening night as soon as they were available, I was nervous going in to see Bohemian Rhapsody tonight: I was half expecting to be let down, expecting to see caricatures or a nearly-good tribute act. As it turned out, I hardly stopped grinning all the way through; well, except for a couple of scenes where I couldn’t help weeping, and one where I struggled to breathe.

Queen is in the blood of every Brit, whether they know it or not, whether they are fans or not: we can’t help but know the music, and many of us know (or think we know) the band. In all odds, most of us just know bits and pieces from gossip, newspapers or the occasional documentary. Bohemian Rhapsody does not present a new story, but it puts all the pieces together; largely with respect, and certainly with affection. It takes the history of Queen from the day Freddie Mercury introduced himself to them up to the day of Live Aid (their peak, some might say); it’s not the full story, by any means, but the main body of it, leaving an image which is worth remembering them – and him – by.

Here’s what fans will be asking about: Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury extremely well. Extremely. He has the mannerisms, he has the expression, and he carries the look like a natural. I am not going to claim that Malek “channels” Mercury, or that he “becomes” him: he is a damn fine actor, playing a role; and he is well cast, for both his appearance, his skill and his background. I have admired Malek in all three seasons of Mr Robot , but not once did it feel like I was with Elliot Alderson; though for a few split seconds, his character from Buster’s Mal Heart bled through a little, when he spoke of loneliness and “in between moments”. Rami Malek is clearly one of those rare actors who does actually play a different character for each role, and I hope he gets awarded for this depiction.

The rest of the band members were cast equally well: Joseph Mazzello as John Deacon, Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor and especially (in my opinion) Gwilym Lee as Brian May. I wasn’t familiar with any of them as actors before, but they could have been twins to the band members at times. In the case of Hardy’s Roger Taylor, this was equally his appearance and manner; in the case of Lee’s May, his facial expressions were spot on. There was no problem at any time accepting these people as who they were representing; indeed the same can be said of minor parts such as Kenny Everett and Bob Geldoff.

Bohemian Rhapsody - Joseph Mazzello and Gwilym Lee

We (my husband and I) couldn’t even see the join when it came to playing music and singing; whether Mazzello was actually playing the bass or not, it certainly looked like he was; and ditto Malek’s singing. A good deal of what we heard was Malek’s voice, but it blended with original Mercury very smoothly. My music producer hubby commented that the equipment and instruments shown were also authentic, especially in the scenes where “A Night at the Opera” was recorded (“wouldn’t surprise me if those were actually May’s”, he said). And not only did it look and sound like the band was really making that music, but it also looked like they were really putting themselves into it and having fun doing so; even when they were arguing.

The senses of time and place were definitely major successes in the production of Bohemian Rhapsody : costumes, cars, music, hair… pubs, even. We knew where we were straight away and at no time was the setting confusing; the story moved forward with natural progression through the years. The production, in general, was respectful to – nay, in worship to – the band: even the Twentieth Century Fox title jingle was rearranged to match Queen’s style; and some of the visual effects (announcing tour cities, for example) flirted with the period with style.

Sometimes, the cinematography was a little deceptive though: the introduction to Bohemian Rhapsody was a journey following Freddie Mercury to the start of Queen’s Live Aid set, peeping in close-up at details along the way, such as sunglasses, wheels on equipment cases and microphones. The directors (Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher) are telling us to expect details, intimacy, I thought. Intimacy was only hinted at though: we got to hear some of what was on Mercury’s mind, and saw his isolation; we saw nothing at all of the other members’ families or lives away from the band at all.

Actually, there was quite a bit of clever manipulation in the script, most notably in the presentation of Mercury’s family. At the start, his father was shown to be disappointed in Mercury’s lifestyle; then a hug on the day of Live Aid brought tears to my eyes, even though I could see what the writers were doing. Did they also apply that to Mercury’s own rise and fall? There are those who say his is a classic cautionary tale against the perils of hedonism – yes, really – and there are certainly moments when both Mercury’s friends and colleagues raise their eyebrows and warn him about his behaviour. But we will never know if the story here closely represents what actually happened: the man it focuses on can no longer give any response. Freddie Mercury died of AIDS, but that does not mean he brought it on himself.

The character of Freddie Mercury is a major feature of Bohemian Rhapsody : the film shows him to be shy at first while struggling to feel his way in life, and then over-compensate with dramatics. It shows him to need his friends (especially the “love of his life”, Mary, played by Lucy Boynton) and to fill his life with strangers when they deserted him. It also showed his coming out as bisexual to Mary and struggling to manage his sexuality, struggling to make it a natural part of his life. I’m sure all these things happened – they felt authentic, like nearly all the film – but to what degree? We’ll never know. I wish he was still around.

As a bisexual person myself, Freddie Mercury has always been a figurehead (Bi Visibility Day is held every year on his birthday for a good reason, after all), and I’m glad they were bold enough to use the word in Bohemian Rhapsody . However, his character in the film spoke it as if it were an easier, halfway statement to being gay, thus creating and diluting that representation all at once. The representation wasn’t great in terms of his ethnic background either: although Malek’s background is as close as one could probably get to Freddie Mercury (Parsi descent, from Zanzibar), the actors playing his parents are both from South-East Asia; a bit ironic when we hear he was (inaccurately) teased as “Paki” at times.

Of course, there was a great deal to the story of both Queen and Freddie Mercury which did not feature in the film: fifteen years or so cannot easily be condensed into just over two hours. Although we see some of Mercury’s solo career (and how it didn’t satisfy him), there is no mention of its successes. There is also no mention of soundtrack work, such as Flash Gordon , Metropolis and Highlander . Only a couple of albums are mentioned, and a couple of tours shown. But what they do show of the music and shows in Bohemian Rhapsody is fabulous and very well chosen: it starts with Doin’ Alright in a pub, we see them making A Night at the Opera , devising the audience participation aspect of We Will Rock You , and finally an abbreviated version of the Live Aid set, as well as a few other pieces along the way. I grinned and silently sang along all the way through, and – as I said earlier – whether it was Malek or Mercury singing, it made little difference to the enjoyment.

Overall, I have to say Bohemian Rhapsody is a must see… not just for music fans, but for film fans. It is beautifully made, and even if it had been fiction, I would have been sucked in by the drama; but it was (at least mostly) true. Do not go in expecting to see a perfect copy of Freddie Mercury and the others. Watch a concert or interview for that; this isn’t like Nick Cave’s 20,000 Days on Earth , where the camera followed him and his band for a period. This is a dramatisation of a major figure’s life, within the life of a major band: of course, there are some liberties with exactly what happened or when; and it is only natural that the band members who are still around had an influence. If you accept the film as what it is, you will enjoy the ride immensely.

Article by Alix Turner

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ARTS & CULTURE

How close does ‘bohemian rhapsody’ come to showing the real freddie mercury.

While the movie has been critiqued for flattening the legacy of Queen, see the band come to life in historic photos

Jackie Mansky

Bohemian Rhapsody will probably not rock you if film critics have anything to say about the new Queen biopic that sees Rami Malek tug on the tight leather pants of Freddie Mercury, the band’s brilliant, frenetic, hedonistic lead singer, who brought a new intensity to what rock ’n’ roll music could be.

The movie tells the story of the inception of Queen in the early 1970s up through its heart-pounding 20-minute set at the Live Aid concert in Wembley Stadium in 1985. But the film has already been slammed for being perceived as caring more about telling a crowd-pleasing story than really digging into Queen’s legacy.

“A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible,” writes A.O. Scott in a scathing review for The New York Times . It’s “safe and circumspect,” writes Glen Weldon for NPR . “It’s a bizarrely anodyne film, too feel-good to be convincing,” writes Amanda Petrusich for the New Yorker . Over at Rolling Stone , Andy Greene helpfully offers a fact-check guide to the scenes the movie gets historically inaccurate (no, the band did not break up before Live Aid).

The problem, as with most biopics, lies squarely with the flattening of history, in this case Mercury's. It’s been more than 25 years since the Queen frontman—born Farrokh Bulsara in the then-British colony of Zanzibar—died of complications from AIDS in 1991. While his onstage persona is the focus of the film, his “ considerable appetites ” as Petrusich of the New Yorker puts it, are barely touched upon— “a coffee table smeared with cocaine, a loaded glance outside a truck-stop toilet, a late-night goose,” that’s all, she writes.

In Into , an LGBTQ-focused digital magazine, Juan Barquin calls attention to the missed opportunity in Bohemian Rhapsody to explore Mercury’s bisexuality, attributing the gloss over in the fall release to its rating, which is PG-13, “and the fact that the surviving straight members of Queen had too much of a hand in telling a dead queer man’s tale.” (Queen's original guitarist, Brian May, and drummer, Roger Taylor, are listed as executive music producers for the film.)

Calling the movie a sympton of a larger issue at play for how Mercury's legacy is told today, Barquin argues the problem “lies in the way history has chosen to remember him, simply as a flaming frontman or as a gay man, bisexuality erased and deeper looks into his life left in the shadows.”

That’s the point that Lakshmi Gandhi also makes in a piece exploring Mercury’s background fo r NBC . It’s often forgotten that the lead singer was brought up in a Parsi household, and long before he enrolled in London's Ealing College of Art, Mercury studied piano in a boarding school in Panchgani. His family only moved to England in 1964 after revolution broke out in the wake of Zanzibar’s independence from Britain.

“This is the thing with Freddie Mercury: I think he operated in at least four closets in his life,” Jason King, an associate professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Music, who is working on a book about Mercury, tells Gandhi. Those "closets" included his sexuality and the AIDS diagnosis, but also his race and nationality.

Unlike the film's careful tred of history, the Queen frontman's layers were visible during his lifetime, but it's something his fans had to want to look for. For instance, while Mercury did not openly discuss his sexuality during his lifetime, as Adam Lambert, Queen’s latest frontman, recently told the U.K. publication Attitude , “I don’t know how ‘in the closet’ Freddie actually was." Lambert believes that Mercury navigated the taboos of the time to speak his truth in his own way. "[H]e sort of owned it from the get-go," says Lambert, who references interviews where Mercury was asked whether he was gay and he'd say: "Yeah as a daffodil… gay as a daffodil." "I don’t know if they thought he was being flippant, but he never really said, ‘No, I’m not’,” says Lambert.

Writing after Mercury's death for Paragraph , a journal in modern critical theory, John Lynch, a lecturer in the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, characterized Queen's audience as mostly consisting of " white, straight men seemingly unaware of, or unconcerned by, the gay iconography" that Mercury promoted. "As a star on stage," he argued, Mercury served as a "'screen' onto which any number of fantasies could be projected." "The very distance between Mercury and the audience acted to keep him apart yet simultaneously permanently available in an imaginary form," he wrote.

In an interview after his health started to fail him, Mercury hinted at such a discrepency , saying , "When I'm performing, I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man."

See photos below that capture the real Freddie Mercury, as curated by rockandroll.si.edu :

Editor's note, 11/2/18: Due to an error in the source material, this piece initially reported that Freddie Mercury studied in a boarding school in Mumbai (then known as Bombay) rather than Panchgani. The piece has been corrected.

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Jackie Mansky | | READ MORE

Jacqueline Mansky is a freelance writer and editor living in Los Angeles. She was previously the assistant web editor, humanities, for Smithsonian magazine.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Review: Rami Malek Will Rock You

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Put Rami Malek high on the list for best film performances of 2018. As Freddie Mercury , the lead singer of the British band Queen , the Mr. Robot star performs miracles, catching the look, strut and soul of Mercury, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991. Sadly, the film itself shows signs of a difficult birth. Sacha Baron Cohen was set to play Mercury before he left over creative differences. And director Bryan Singer ( X-Men, The Usual Suspects ) was fired for not showing up on set (an uncredited Dexter Fletcher replaced him).

So, yeah, Bohemian Rhapsody moves in fits and starts as we follow Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara of Parsi descent, from baggage handler at Heathrow Airport to co-founder of Queen with guitarist/astrophysics scholar Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer/dental student Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy). He auditioned for the musicians in a parking lot and, with incautious speed, is soon onstage as their frontman with John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) joining in on bass. Shy offstage and struggling with his love for Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) and his growing attraction to men, Mercury was secretive and conflicted. But when the singer plays “Love of My Life” on the piano to show his love, the feeling comes through as genuine due to the raw emotion Malek and Boynton pour into their roles. It’s significant that Mercury left Austin the bulk of his fortune in his will. No similar authenticity seeps into the scenes of Mercury’s hedonistic gay lifestyle as a partygiver, participating in orgies that come off here as more mild than wild.

In struggling to make a salable PG-13 movie out of an R-rated rock life, Bohemian Rhapsody leaves you feeling that something essential and elemental is missing. Thankfully, there’s the music that keeps filling the holes in the script by Anthony McCarten ( Darkest Hour, The Theory of Everything ) with a virtuoso thrum that is never less than thrilling. And there is Malek, who digs so deep into the role that we can’t believe we’re not watching the real thing, starting from singer and actor sharing an immigrant experience (the actor’s parents are from Egypt, Mercury’s from Zanzibar). Mixing his voice with vocals from Queen and Mercury soundalike Marc Martel, the star is pow personified. On set, the actor sang out the throat-straining vocals in his own voice so that, take after take, the lip-synching would match up perfectly and erase any taint of bad karaoke. He also wore fake teeth to capture the four extra incisors in Mercury’s upper jaw that the singer insisted gave him more power and range. And he nails the frontman’s sexual bravado onstage, with his cropped hair and porn-star mustache, letting loose with “We Are the Champions,” “We Will Rock You,” “Radio Ga Ga” and the title song. The creation of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” an unprecedented, six-minute mix of rock and opera that delighted Mercury even as critics decried it, allows for a comic bit with Mike Myers as an EMI record exec who claims no one will ever play it. (Feel free to press play on a YouTube clip of him headbanging to the song in Wayne’s World any time now.)

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Many of the major Queen hits are heard in the film’s most daring conceit, a scrupulous recreation of the band’s 20-minute appearance at the 1985 Live Aid concert from London’s Wembley Stadium, which many called the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Hard to argue. Whatever special effects were used to show the band in front of this enormous crowd, the scene captures something crucial about Queen’s connection to an audience as Mercury leads an elaborate call-and-response with his fans. The rousing life that Malek brings to this extraordinary recreation deserves all the cheers it gets. Screw the film’s flaws — you don’t want to miss his performance.

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Rock Critics Really Blew Their Reviews of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’

T he song “Bohemian Rhapsody”–which was released 40 years ago, Oct. 31, 1975–did not appear destined for the hit parade. It was, in TIME’s words, “a six-minute cut that mingles introspection with Gilbert and Sullivan operatics” by a band with little public profile. Yet it quickly topped the charts in England and propelled Queen on a 21-city U.S. tour.

The critics never saw it coming.

“Unfortunately,” TIME opined, “Queen’s lyrics are not the stuff of sonnets.” The New York Times , reviewing a 1978 appearance at Madison Square Garden came down equally hard: “Lyrically, Queen’s songs manage to be pretentious and irrelevant. Musically, for all the virtuosity—though it was cheating a bit to turn over the complex middle portion of their ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to a taped version, with empty stage and flashing lights—the songs still sound mostly pretty empty, all flash and calculation.”

Rolling Stone didn’t mention the song in its review of the album A Night at the Opera (“The Prophet’s Song” got top billing as the best track) but later referred to the song as a “brazen hodgepodge.”

But that skepticism is long gone. Rolling Stone eventually put “Bohemian Rhapsody” on its list of the 500 greatest songs ever, and it also has pride of place on TIME’s own list of the greatest songs since 1923.

Read more about the rise of Queen, here in the TIME Vault: Hail to Queen

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Mixed Bohemian Rhapsody reactions praise Rami Malek's Freddie Mercury as 'fantastic'

Early reactions to Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody are, to quote its titular song’s first verse, a “little high, little low.”

The musical drama (directed by Bryan Singer, who was later fired and replaced with Dexter Fletcher ) about the Queen frontman’s rise to superstardom as part of the British rock band screened Sunday for press and industry attendees on the Fox lot in Los Angeles, and social media impressions have thus far pointed to a mixed reception for the awards hopeful.

“ Bohemian Rhapsody is a glorified Wikipedia entry,” The New York Times ‘ Kyle Buchanan tweeted, though he — like other critics who shared somewhat negative responses to the film itself — praised Malek’s leading turn. “But Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury (and wears his wonderful costumes) with incredible gusto.”

“Just did a double feature of A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody and yeeeeesh that contrast didn’t do the latter any favors,” IndieWire critic David Ehrlich wrote. “Rami Malek sure nails that imitation, tho.”

The Los Angeles Times ‘ Jen Yamato summed up her feelings on the film with a reference to an embarrassing evening out: “Watching Bohemian Rhapsody reminded me of the time I subjected a karaoke bar to Queen’s ‘Who Wants To Live Forever,'” she tweeted. “And, well, sometimes you’ve got to read a room.”

Widely expected to be an Oscar player for Malek’s work, the film — produced by The Departed ‘s Graham King and written by The The Theory of Everything scribe Anthony McCarten — follows Queen from its early days playing small venues through to their renowned performance at Live Aid in 1985.

Bohemian Rhapsody is scheduled for release on Nov. 2. Read on for social media reactions to the film.

Bohemian Rhapsody: History vs. Hollywood

REEL FACE:	REAL FACE:
May 12, 1981 Los Angeles, California, USA	September 5, 1946 Stone Town, Sultanate of Zanzibar November 24, 1991, London, England, UK
November 24, 1983 London, England, UK	July 19, 1947 Hampton, London, UK Queen Guitarist 1970 - Present
January 2, 1991 Bournemouth, Dorset, England, UK	July 26, 1949 King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, UK Queen Drummer 1970 - Present
September 21, 1983 Rhinebeck, New York, USA	August 19, 1951 Leicester, England, UK Queen Bass Guitarist 1971 - 1997
January 17, 1994 New York City, New York, USA	1951 Fulham, London, UK Freddie Mercury's One Time Girlfriend and Lifelong Friend
April 24, 1968 Dublin, Ireland	September 9, 1949 Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, UK Queen's Manager 1975 - 1978
August 25, 1967 Bristol, England, UK	March 1942 Gloucester, UK Queen's Manager 1978 - Present
May 18, 1981 Killiney, County Dublin, Ireland	August 1991 Freddie Mercury's Personal Manager 1977 - 1986
1978 Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, UK	January 4, 1949 County Carlow, Ireland January 1, 2010 Freddie Mercury's Partner

Did Freddie Mercury change his name?

Yes. The Bohemian Rhapsody true story reveals that he was born Farrokh Bulsara on September 5, 1946 in Stone Town, Sultanate of Zanzibar (now Tanzania) in eastern Africa. He started going by "Freddie" while attending St. Peter's School, a British-style boarding school near Bombay (now Mumbai). It wasn't until he formed the band Queen in the spring of 1970 that he decided to also change his surname, switching it from "Bulsara" to "Mercury". On Freddie's birth certificate, his parents listed their nationality as "British Indian" and under race they put "Parsi", an ethnic group rooted in Persia. Freddie Mercury (left) in 1977 and actor Rami Malek as Mercury in the Bohemian Rhapsody movie.

When did Freddie Mercury arrive in the UK?

Freddie graduated from St. Peters boarding school when he was 16 and returned to his family in Zanzibar. The country gained independence from Britain in December 1963. A month later, the bloody Zanzibar Revolution began, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Indians and Arabs. The political unrest in the country put Freddie's family in danger and they fled to the United Kingdom. In the following months, Freddie enrolled at Isleworth Polytechnic (now West Thames College), majoring in art. The earliest known footage of Freddie Mercury was taken during his freshman year at the college. He earned a degree in Art and Graphic Design from Ealing Art College in London. In England, Freddie's taste for music expanded from the Indian music he was exposed to growing up, to include the rock and roll music of the day. He was influenced by numerous bands, most notably Elvis Presley, The Who, Jimi Hendrix , Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. He also cited Liza Minnelli as an influence, specifically her Academy Award-winning performance in Cabaret .

When did Freddie Mercury first start performing for paying crowds?

Though he had been in a band called The Hectics while in primary school, his first performance in front of a paying audience was on August 23, 1969 as a vocalist for the band Ibex, who had been looking for a singer. Freddie sung Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock". Future Queen band members Brian May and Roger Taylor were then part of a band named Smile. They knew Freddie and traveled to Liverpool to see him perform with Ibex, even joining Ibex on stage. This marked the first steps toward the birth of Queen. Freddie convinced the other members in Ibex to change the band name to Wreckage. Not long after, the band began to fall apart due to outside obligations by the members, including college, day jobs, and the drummer relocating to America. -Bio Channel The real Freddy Mercury (left) feeds off the electric atmosphere at Live Aid in 1985. Rami Malek re-creates Mercury's passion for performing in the 2018 movie.

How did Freddie Mercury meet bandmates Brian May and Roger Taylor?

The movie fictionalizes the formation of Queen and makes it much simpler than it was in real life. In the film, Freddie Mercury stumbles into a 1970 performance by Brian May and Roger Taylor's band Smile, which preceded Queen. Mercury meets up with May and Taylor after the show, coincidentally right after their bassist/singer Tim Staffell quits. They're skeptical of Mercury at first, but he wins them over when he delivers an impromptu rendition of their song "Doing Alright". In answering the question, "How accurate is Bohemian Rhapsody ?" we learned that Mercury actually met his future bandmates in less spontaneous fashion at the time he was attending Ealing Art College in London. While there, he befriended Tim Staffell, who was then part of the band Smile with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. May had been attending Imperial College in London at the time and had been working on his PhD in astrophysics. Taylor was indeed studying to become a dentist. Mercury became a fan of the band Smile and got to know May and Taylor. Brian May recalls Mercury hassling them to let him become a member, but they resisted until Tim Staffell left the band in 1970. Top (left to right): Actors Joseph Mazzello, Ben Hardy, Rami Malek and Gwilym Lee. Bottom: Their real-life counterparts, John Deacon, Roger Taylor, Freddie Mercury and Brian May, circa 1976.

Did Freddie Mercury meet girlfriend Mary Austin the same night he joined the band?

No. The Bohemian Rhapsody movie has Freddie meeting his future girlfriend Mary Austin just before his first run-in with Brian May and Roger Taylor, at which point he becomes a member of the band. This is a departure from the true story. In reality, Brian May had briefly dated Mary Austin. Freddie didn't become interested in her until after he was already the lead singer of the band. -RollingStone

Was John Deacon the band's original bass player?

Fact-checking Bohemian Rhapsody confirms that Freddie Mercury was known for having an eye for detail and being a perfectionist. By May 1970, his desire to create the perfect band had contributed to the demise of the first two groups he was in. It was around this time that Brian May and Roger Taylor's band Smile had lost member Tim Staffell, who left to join the band Humpy Bong. Freddie came on board and persuaded the remaining members to change the band's name to Queen. They did recruit John Deacon to play bass, but not until 1971. He wasn't the band's original bassist like in the movie, nor did he play at the first Queen concert in 1970. He was actually the fourth bassist they tried.

Is Mike Myers character, record executive Ray Foster, based on an actual person?

No. Mike Myers (pictured below) portrays Ray Foster, an executive at the EMI record label. The character is fictional. We found no evidence of a real-life Ray Foster while researching the Bohemian Rhapsody true story. At best, he is very loosely based on EMI chief Roy Featherstone, but unlike Foster in the movie, Featherstone was a big fan of Queen. However, he did complain that their song "Bohemian Rhapsody" was too long to be released as a single. That's the only similarity. -Rolling Stone Mike Myers portrays the bearded EMI executive Ray Foster.

Was the band aware of the multiple meanings of their name "Queen"?

Yes. "It had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations," Mercury said when asked about the inception of the name. "I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it." -SGN.org

Did Freddie Mercury have four extra teeth in the back of his mouth?

Yes. This is true and is why his front teeth protruded, a characteristic that fueled a lifetime of insecurity. He didn't want to have the extra teeth removed because he feared that it would change the resonance of his voice, believing that the extra teeth stretched his palate and helped give him his sound. During the 1970s and 1980s, Freddie led Queen to a slew of hit songs, many of which he composed, including 10 of the 17 on their Greatest Hits album . This includes their biggest hit, " Bohemian Rhapsody ", after which the movie is named. -Bio Channel The real Freddie Mercury (left) sings "Bohemian Rhapsody" at Live Aid in 1985. Rami Malek delivers an accurate re-creation of the moment for the movie.

Was Queen's first album a success?

Not exactly. Although their self-titled 1973 album Queen put them on the recording map, it didn't receive critical acclaim and its reception was largely subdued. The album didn't help the band take off in the way they had hoped. After accepting a gig at London's Hammersmith Odeon as the opening act for rockers Mott the Hoople, Queen used onstage theatrics to help raise their public profile, particularly Freddie Mercury's outlandish costumes and over-the-top performances. It gradually became clear that they were no longer just a supporting act. Their label, EMI, took notice and the band recorded their second album, Queen II , which was released in March 1974. It was a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Their third album, Sheer Heart Attack , was released in November of the same year and contained the hit single "Killer Queen". To hear all of their hits, check out the Queen Greatest Hits Album . Queen Greatest Hits albums are available for purchase and streaming. This album cover features (clockwise from top left) Roger Taylor, Brian May, Freddie Mercury and John Deacon. The photo was taken in 1981 by Lord Snowdon, former husband of Princess Margaret .

Were Freddie Mercury and Mary Austin engaged to be married?

Yes. During the several years that Freddie and Mary lived together in the 1970s, he proposed to Mary and they were at one point engaged to be married. -Time

Did Freddie Mercury ever have relationships with women again after he came to terms with his sexuality and told Mary?

Yes. In the movie, Rami Malek's Freddie comes out to Mary (Lucy Boynton) and tells her that he's bisexual. She responds by telling him that he is gay. This is fairly accurate to real life, except for the fact that the movie never challenges Mary's assertion. In reality, Freddie refused to ever label himself and continued to have both male and female lovers. German actress Barbara Valentin was one such prominent female lover of Freddie's.

Did Queen really take a risk with their song "Bohemian Rhapsody"?

Yes. Released as part of their fourth studio album, A Night at the Opera (1975), Freddie Mercury's vision for "Bohemian Rhapsody" was an equally risky endeavor in real life too. At 5 minutes 55 seconds in length, the unconventional rock song was long and risked being rejected by radio stations. In order to reach the most people possible, they recorded a flashy, kaleidoscopic video to accompany the song. It proved to be a genius promotional strategy, well before the days it was done regularly on MTV. The Bohemian Rhapsody music video helped to make them overnight global superstars and the song remained at number one on the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks. Freddy Mercury (left) on stage at the Live Aid concert in 1985. Rami Malek (right) as Mercury in the movie.

Did Freddie Mercury really love cats as much as the character does in the movie?

Yes. The film is accurate in its depiction of Mercury's adoration for cats. According to the memoir of his personal assistant, Peter Freestone, he would even talk to them on the phone when he was away, which is shown in the movie. Mercury owned a number of cats throughout his life.

Did Freddie Mercury really remain close friends with his one-time girlfriend Mary Austin?

Yes. The Bohemian Rhapsody true story supports that Freddie met Mary Austin when he was a starving musician. They moved in together and she supported him for a time. She was the one person he trusted. They remained friends even after they broke up in 1976 when he was coming to terms with his sexuality. During a 1985 interview, Freddie said of Mary, "All my lovers asked me why they couldn't replace Mary, but it's simply impossible. The only friend I've got is Mary, and I don't want anybody else. To me, she was my common-law wife. To me, it was a marriage. We believe in each other, that's enough for me." She was the one person he trusted most throughout his career. Mary was a comfort to Freddie during his final years as well. He left Mary the bulk of his estate (his house and recording royalties worth more than $10 million) when he died from AIDS complications in 1991. He reasoned that if he had kept living as a straight man, they would have married and had a life together. Leaving her the estate was his way of acknowledging that, in addition to the fact that she remained a true friend through thick and thin. Mary Austin still lives in Freddie's home in Kensington, England with her family. Mary Austin and Freddie Mercury remained very close friends after they split up when Freddie came to terms with his sexuality.

Did Queen ever split up?

No. It is here that the movie makes its biggest departure from the truth. In the film, we see the band livid at Freddie for signing a $4 million solo deal behind their back. He tells them that he wants to take a break from the band and they all go their separate ways. The truth is much less dramatic. The band was burned out by 1983, having been on tour for a decade. They all agreed on taking a break to focus on their solo careers but they stayed in touch, starting work on The Works later that year. -RollingStone Get the Thunderbolt and Lightning T-Shirt that features the famous astronomer referenced in the "Bohemian Rhapsody" song.

Did Freddie Mercury meet boyfriend Jim Hutton when Hutton was a servant at his party?

No. A fact-check of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie reveals that Freddie Mercury's partner, Jim Hutton, had been a hairdresser in Ireland before moving to London, where he met Mercury at a nightclub. The movie instead has them fictionally meeting when Hutton is working as a server at a hedonistic party hosted by Mercury. Despite Hutton rejecting him, they talk late into the night. In the movie, they part ways and Mercury tracks Hutton down after looking him up in a phone book years later. In an interview Hutton did with The Times of London , he said that he did reject Mercury after Mercury offered to buy him a drink at the nightclub. He hadn't recognized the superstar. They saw each other again about a year and a half later at, once again, a nightclub. Mercury again offered to buy him a drink, and this time, Hutton accepted. In reality, Hutton was then working as a hairdresser at London's Savoy Hotel. His seven-year relationship with Mercury had begun by 1985 and they remained together until Mercury's death in November 1991. After revealing to Hutton that he had AIDS, Mercury told him that he'd understand if he wanted to leave. Hutton replied, "I love you, Freddie, I'm not going anywhere." Hutton himself was diagnosed with AIDS in 1990, and it took him a year to break the news to Mercury. Hutton is not featured prominently in the Bohemian Rhapsody movie because the film concludes with Queen's 1985 Live Aid performance, which happened not long after his relationship with Mercury began. -IrishCentral.com

Was Queen's performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert really as big as it's made out to be in the movie?

Yes and no. Live Aid wasn't a reunion for the band. In real life, they had actually released their album The Works in early 1984 and had been on tour all over the world. They were well-rehearsed by the time they were set to perform at Live Aid. Despite the band's personal story being less dramatic in real life, their performance at Live Aid was just as impressive as in the movie, if not more so. Queen's 20-minute set at the July 13, 1985 Live Aid concert held at Wembley Stadium in London, England is considered by many notable music publications to be one of the greatest rock performances of all time. Journalists for Rolling Stone , the BBC, The Telegraph , MTV and CNN all stated that Queen stole the show, which was viewed by a crowd of 72,000 and a TV audience of 1.9 billion, the largest ever at that point. Freddie Mercury controlled the captivated audience, who clapped along to hits like "Radio Ga Ga". Watch the Complete Queen Live Aid Concert Video . Top: Freddie Mercury and Queen perform at Wembley Stadium on July 13, 1985 in front of 72,000 people as part of Live Aid. Bottom: Rami Malek in the role of Mercury performs at the Live Aid concert in the Bohemian Rhapsody movie.

Did Freddie Mercury's personal manager, Paul Prenter, betray him?

Yes. In real life, Paul Prenter (portrayed by Allen Leech in the movie) worked as Freddie Mercury's personal manager from 1977 to 1986. It is true that the other members of Queen didn't like him, calling him a "bad influence". He was fired by Mercury for selling the singer's personal information to UK newspapers (not for failing to tell Mercury about Live Aid). This included information about their own on and off affair, and the singer's lifestyle as a gay man, noting how Mercury's former lovers were dying of AIDS. Unlike the movie, he never exposed Mercury's private life in a TV interview, only in print. In addition, his firing didn't happen prior to Live Aid. It happened the following year in 1986. Prenter himself died of AIDS-related complications in August 1991, just three months before Mercury passed away from the disease.

When was Freddie Mercury diagnosed with AIDS?

It is widely believed that Freddie was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, two years after Live Aid. The film has him telling the band during rehearsals for Live Aid in 1985. This was added for dramatic effect and is almost certainly not true. He gave his final filmed interview in 1987 but mentioned nothing of the illness. He revealed the truth to his family and close friends in 1989. He didn't publicly acknowledge he had the sexually transmitted disease until he released an official statement on November 23, 1991, the day before his death. It read: Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV-positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date in order to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth and I hope that everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease. He is believed to have contracted the virus via sexual encounters he had as a gay man. -Bio Channel Freddy Mercury (top) leads the crowd during a performance of "Radio Ga Ga" at the Live Aid concert in 1985. Actor Rami Malek (bottom) re-creates the performance in the movie.

Did Freddie Mercury record a duet album with an opera singer?

Yes. This happened two years after the events chronicled in the movie. After seeing operatic soprano Montserrat Caballé live, he met her and the pair decided to record an album together, 1987's Barcelona . The album was independent of Queen and featured the single "Barcelona", which later appeared on Queen's Greatest Hits III . In October of 1988, Freddie traveled to Spain to perform three songs with Caballé. It was heralded as one of his greatest performances. It would also be his last.

How many albums did Freddie Mercury create with Queen?

During the two decades from 1970 to 1990, Freddie Mercury helped steer Queen through 18 albums and dozens of hit songs. Freddie Mercury (left) on the cover of his debut 1985 solo album Mr. Bad Guy and Rami Malek (right) in the movie.

Were the surviving band members involved in the making of the movie?

Yes. Queen bandmates Brian May and Roger Taylor spent eight years trying to get the biopic made. "We’re very conscious that we get one shot, and if we don’t do it, someone else will do it badly," May said in an interview with TeamRock. "We will do it without avoiding anything – any aspect of Freddie. But we will try to keep it all in balance. I think if we get it right it will crystallize the way the world understands Freddie." In 2010, comic actor Sasha Baron Cohen was attached to play Freddie Mercury, but he walked away from the project in 2013 over creative disputes with May and Taylor. Director Bryan Singer was fired in December 2017 over several missed days and a tense relationship with lead actor Rami Malek. Dexter Fletcher ( Eddie the Eagle ) was brought in to finish the project. Brian May and Roger Taylor spent time on set, in addition to longtime manager Jim Beach and others. Greg Brooks, the band's official archivist, worked closely with the filmmakers to make the movie as accurate as possible. This included details like the type of socks that John Deacon was wearing. Queen guitarist Brian May and actor Gwilym Lee on the Bohemian Rhapsody movie set.

From Queen's 1985 Live Aid performance to candid Freddie Mercury interviews, the following list of videos will help to broaden your knowledge of the Bohemian Rhapsody true story.

Bohemian Rhapsody: History vs. Hollywood Episode

Earliest Footage of Freddie Mercury (1964)

Queen's Official Music Video for Bohemian Rhapsody

Queen's Full 1985 Live Aid Concert Performance

Mary Austin Interview on Freddie Mercury and his Sexuality

Freddie Mercury Birthday Video Tribute

Freddie Mercury's Final Interview

Last Footage of Freddie Mercury Before He Died in 1991

Bohemian Rhapsody Freddie Mercury Biopic Trailer

Unsung Hero History vs. Hollywood Episode

The Most Brutal Reviews For Bohemian Rhapsody So Far

When 20th Century Fox announced plans for a biopic about the legendary rock band Queen, with particular focus on its eccentric frontman Freddie Mercury, plenty of people were screaming out "Galileo!" in sheer delight. After replacing Sacha Baron Cohen, who was originally set to portray Mercury but dropped out when he couldn't see eye to eye with the living members of Queen on the over-the-top and debaucherous manner in which he wanted to approach the role, with Mr. Robot actor Rami Malek , Fox unleashed Bohemian Rhapsody onto the masses on November 2.

But when the film opened its metaphorical mouth to belt out its songs and stories, it hit a few flat notes.

For some, Bohemian Rhapsody was no killer queen, feeling like a bunch of radio ga-ga rather than a rock-and-rolling romp of a musical biopic. While the majority of viewers enjoyed Bohemian Rhapsody well enough — taking it as not a great film but at least an entertaining one , and giving lead actor Malek a proverbial standing ovation for his "transcendent and beyond Oscar-worthy" performance — plenty of critics published brutal reviews of the film.

Here's just a taste of the harshest responses to Bohemian Rhapsody .

IndieWire 's Dave Erlich argued that not even Malek's "spirited" performance as Mercury could save director Bryan Singer's "royally embarrassing," "broad, frivolous, and uselessly formulaic" Queen biopic.

"If not for Rami Malek's feral posturing as one of rock history's greatest frontmen, a deep roster of killer songs, and the long shadow of his band's iconic 1985 performance at Live Aid, this movie could effectively be about any musicians, at any time, rolling through any part of the United States. From the disapproving parents, to the drug-fueled orgies, to the unbelievable scene when a young Freddie Mercury (née Farrokh Bulsara) introduces himself to Brian May and Roger Taylor mere seconds after the two bandmates have been abandoned by their original lead singer, it's an out-of-body experience to watch such a paint-by-numbers portrait in a post- Walk Hard world," wrote Erlich. "If there's anything more tiresome than the movies that inspired the Dewey Cox story, it's a movie that uses Jake Kasdan's damning parody as a template. Even when it's funny, Bohemian Rhapsody isn't in on the joke — it's too busy burnishing its own myth."

Rafer Guzmán of Newsday mentioned Kasdan's biopic parody Walk Hard in his review as well, writing that Bohemian Rhapsody is exactly the type of movie that should never have happened after Walk Hard 's release. "The story of a charismatic rock star living at the peak of rock history — the mid-1970s — Bohemian Rhapsody comes built-in with a headbanging soundtrack, 20 years' worth of costume changes and, in true rock fashion, a tragically early death (Mercury died at the age of 45, from complications of AIDS). By rights, this ought to be a glammed-up, sexually-charged, four-octave blowout. Instead, it's a stilted, stagy, hopelessly corny biopic, the kind of thing Walk Hard was meant to prevent," wrote Guzmán.

The New Yorker 's Anthony Lane also got a parody vibe from Bohemian Rhapsody. "As a film, Bohemian Rhapsody is all over the place," Lane typed out. "The later sections of the story, dealing with Mercury's AIDS diagnosis, are carefully handled, but most of the film is stuffed with lumps of cheesy rock-speak ('We're just not thinking big enough'; 'I won't compromise my vision'), and gives off the delicious aroma of parody."

Mike Ryan of Uproxx didn't have much praise for Bohemian Rhapsody either, comparing the biopic to a game of "dirty pool" in his review.

"Either one of the next two things are true: Either the surviving members of Queen still resent the fact that so much of their legacy is wrapped up in Freddie Mercury that they had to make this revisionist history of a movie, or the surviving members are so cinematically tone deaf they inadvertently made a movie that sure comes off like that's what they were trying to do," Ryan said. "To now retcon [Mercury's] illness into his Live Aid performance seems flippant and cruel. But that's the nature of this movie, to reposition and recast Freddie's life as how the rest of the band members seemed fit to do. I have no idea if it was malicious — probably, consciously, it wasn't — but regardless, this is the end result: to punish Freddie Mercury 27 years after his death. And, without the surviving band members' permission, this movie couldn't use Queen's music. In hindsight, it would be better if this movie didn't exist at all."

Kimber Myers, a critic at The Playlist , felt that Bohemian Rhapsody was "embarrassingly unprepared to cover the life of its subject," and because of that, the film couldn't stop itself from becoming a "jumbled take on the legend" that's "squawky, sexless, and shallow, assaulting the senses as it offers little insight or real depth into Mercury or the band he fronted." Myers continued, " Bohemian Rhapsody takes the medley approach to the musician's biography, changing songs abruptly — literally and figuratively – in each moment it starts to get interesting. Even the iconic Live Aid concert gets the radio edit treatment, giving the audience only a sampling of the man and the band's full spectrum of genius," before concluding that the film "is as intimate as a sold-out stadium show, with none of the accompanying power" and marking it with a D+ grade.

Little White Lies ' Hannah Woodhead wrote that, while Malek is "perhaps the best version of Freddie we could hope for," the late, great frontman deserved more than Bohemian Rhapsody : "It's nowhere near as interesting or absorbing as its central figure, and in glossing over the elements of Mercury's identity and life which are so vital and important to many – his race, sexuality, and the fact he was the first major rock star to die of AIDS — Bohemian Rhapsody leaves a sour taste. This is a revisionist attempt at painting Mercury in primary colors suitable for audiences who'd rather just bop along to the Greatest Hits than think about the man who shared his gift with the world until it killed him, and Freddie deserves so much more."

Roger Ebert 's Sheila O'Malley too stamped Bohemian Rhapsody as a stinker, and found fault with the film's hesitancy to properly portray Mercury's queerness. " Bohemian Rhapsody is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign," she wrote. "However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign. The tensions of being a gay man in the 1970s are not handled, or even addressed ... There's no other word for this approach than phobic."

But it was The New York Times critic A.O. Scott whose review fired lethal shots at the film. " Bohemian Rhapsody , the movie about Queen, lasts more than two hours, not a very long time by modern feature standards, even though it feels interminable. A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by the lead actor, Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury, Queen's lead singer. Those choppers may give you nightmares," Scott said. "And some of you who venture into the theater will surely be inspired to exclaim 'Mama mia, let me go!'"

Although not everyone was rocked by the film, it's sort of a miracle that Bohemian Rhapsody made it to screens at all. The biopic hit a huge snag in the road to release when Singer was fired after his "unexpected unavailability" due to a "personal health matter" — as well as the "growing tension" between Singer and Malek that reportedly came to a head when Singer allegedly threw an object in Malek's general direction – forced the production into hiatus and spurred Fox to tap Dexter Fletcher as Singer's replacement . Long before that happened, Singer was said to have skipped out on entire days of shooting, leaving cinematographer Thomas Newton Sigel to step in and take over his duties. Actor Tom Hollander, who plays Queen band manager Jim Beach, even reportedly briefly quit the movie due to Singer's behavior. Following Singer's firing, one source stated that the director was "suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder" due to the animosity, hostility, and tension on the set of the film.

It goes without saying that these reviews are just a handful of the harshest responses to Bohemian Rhapsody . As with all movies — not just biopics about iconic bands and their lead vocalists — some people dug Bohemian Rhapsody and others flat-out hated it. Such is life, and as Queen themselves say, the show must go on .

Bohemian Rhapsody Review

Biopics usually occupy one of two lanes: glossy, Hollywood-friendly products or historical-leaning narratives that pay more service to the facts of reality. It looked like we were going to get the latter when Peter Morgan was first announced as the writer of what would eventually become Bohemian Rhapsody , and for a time, that was exciting. But then the project that eventually became director Bryan Singer 's version of events was executed, and while there's moments of energy within, it's mostly a cotton candy telling of the life and times of Freddie Mercury and Queen.

Farrokh Bulsara had dreams of becoming the person he felt he was always born to be, and it took him becoming Freddie Mercury ( Rami Malek ) to get there. But even when Farrokh became Freddie, there was still something missing, something it'd take years for him to figure out. Through the woman he loved (Lucy Boynton) and the ragtag family of band mates he'd eventually join up with (Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joseph Mazzello,) two very important things would happen: Freddie would become the man he always wanted to be, and Queen would become a legendary act in music history.

The positive aspects of Bohemian Rhapsody are unfortunately outweighed by the negatives. For starters, the film's approach to the story of Freddie's personal life, and Queen's formation / road to Live Aid, is lacking when it comes to two key areas of any good biopic: pacing and reverence to the source material.

In the area of pacing, the fault lies in the fact that Bohemian Rhapsody covers 15 years of history with great speed, but little detail. The film hits milestones such as the band's first demo, the formation of the titular track, and Freddie's falling out / reunion with the band in such a rapid pace that it doesn't really land the significance of any of those moments. We see them happen, but we don't really feel their impact too significantly before moving onto the next signpost.

When Queen gets to be Queen in Bohemian Rhapsody , the movie actually finds some energy to put out into the audience. You can see it in the decision to lean on the Live Aid concert as both a framing device and closing act to the film's narrative. If this was a real-time recreation of that 20 minute set, or even a film that used that event as a lynchpin to keep revisiting throughout the film, there might have been a better economy of pacing.

Instead, the film feels like it rushes through everything else, just to get to that point, and when it gets there, it decides to put up its feet and linger, rather than finish as quickly as it started. It also doesn't help that when it comes to Freddie's infamous personal life of excess, Bohemian Rhapsody pays lip-service to the subject of his vices. Again, we're shown Mercury mingling at a gay bar, having lavish parties with drugs and alcohol, and eventually starting to succumb to AIDS; but it's in such a slight manner that it doesn't feel genuine.

Thankfully, that criticism cannot be said about the main cast of Bohemian Rhapsody , as while the film's script may be confused if it's telling a real life history or tongue in cheek dramedy based on reality, the actors involved know exactly how to deliver the material. Rami Malek is going to get a lot of attention for playing Freddie Mercury, and he damned well deserves it. Even in moments that look like they were plucked from a sitcom version of an actor starring in a stock biopic, Malek, as well as the rest of the cast, maintain their dignity and pour their hearts into the picture.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a film that has a killer soundtrack and fantastic performances despite the material's shortcomings. But when it comes to evaluating the film as a biopic, it's a film that carries on (carries on), but ultimately doesn't really matter. It educates the audience on the history of Queen and Freddie Mercury in the same way that a Cliff's Notes page would teach a student about the book of their choosing.

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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Movie Review: An Insight into “Bohemian Rhapsody”

Arts/Entertainment

By: Amanda Cichewicz | Photographer

November 07, 2018

The movie revolving around the making of Queen and Freddie Mercury, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” was directed by Bryan Singer and released on November 02, 2018. This movie has older generations falling in love with Queen all over again, and younger generations loving them for the first time.

The movie is based ob a true story, following how Freddie Mercury and his fellow band mates (Brian May, Robert Taylor, & John Deacon) became Queen. Freddie Mercury (played by Rami Malek) started out as a nobody until one day he went to a local concert. He decided to talk to the band and, lucky for him, they had just lost their lead singer. He then offered to be their lead singer, and the rest of the band accepted; Mercury then named the band ‘Queen.’ From that day on everyone around the world was interested in knowing who Queen was and what music they were about to produce.

The acting by Rami Malek had everyone starstruck; his acting captured the essence of Freddie Mercury as well as added his own finishing touches. There was no doubt his acting would soar above the previously set standard from his acting in “The Night of the Museum.” Each cast member evidently poured their hearts and souls into their acting, making the movie come to life as if it was actually Queen.

Sophomore Reilly Baggs agrees that the acting did not disappoint anyone. Baggs said, “I think the actors did a great job in capturing the moment and making you feel like you were apart of the movie. I really enjoyed the actor Rami Malek in the leading roll as Freddie Mercury, I think he did a great job portraying Freddie Mercury’s musical creativity and weird personality.”

This statement, made by Baggs, captures the sense of reality portrayed in the movie. The audience felt as if they were part of the movie movie, the whole theater filled with loud music and happy vibes. The movie illustrated Queen in a positive and fun way, the audience wishing they were actually attending a Queen concert. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was even inclusive of the darker side of Queen’s history, such as when Mercury passed away due to AIDS in 1991. Every moment, from the start of the band’s career to the very end of it, was depicted artfully. “Bohemian Rhapsody” does true justice to capturing the history of such an iconic band.

2 Comments on Movie Review: An Insight into “Bohemian Rhapsody”

Great review! I really want to go see “Bohemian Rhapsody”!

This was such a good movie! I would recommend that everyone go see it, whether or not you are a fan of Queen. Like the article says, the audience really feels as though they were part of the movie!

Joy Williams Grudgingly Revises, Word by Word

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What books are on your night stand?

Walton Ford’s “Pancha Tantra.” A stunning assemblage of the painter’s vivid and tragic work. Also, a tattered “Testament Newydd” found years ago in a broken church in Wales, re-bound through the kindness of New York’s Argosy Book Store . I know only six words of Welsh but I love looking through it.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

I can’t recall the best but the worst was if you’re not having fun don’t do it.

What book should nobody read until the age of 70?

Lewis Carroll maybe? “The Mad Gardener’s Song”?

He thought he saw a Rattlesnake That questioned him in Greek: He looked again, and found it was The Middle of Next Week.

Not until the seventh or eighth decade would this make perfect sense.

A writer in The New York Times once called you the “pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance.” Does the shoe fit?

Bard? Shoe? What peculiar words.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Favorite antihero or villain?

I have several. Harrison’s Dalva, McCarthy’s Judge, Flannery O’Connor’s Grandmother, Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, DeLillo’s Lauren Hartke, Lowry’s Consul, Sorokin’s Crouper, Didion’s Maria Wyeth.

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COMMENTS

'Bohemian Rhapsody' Review: Another One Bites the Dust
PG-13. 2h 14m. By A.O. Scott. Oct. 30, 2018. "Bohemian Rhapsody," the song by Queen, lasts nearly six minutes, a very long time for a pop single back in 1975. A baroque blend of gibberish ...
Review: In "Bohemian Rhapsody," Freddie Mercury Is ...
In one of the movie's exemplary scenes, Freddie is at home with his parents, planning an escape into music (and declaring that his name is no longer his given one of Farrokh but, rather, Freddie ...
Bohemian Rhapsody movie review (2018)
Advertisement. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign. However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign.
'Bohemian Rhapsody' Trailer: Rami Malek Plays Freddie Mercury
Instead, it focuses on the remarkable physical resemblance between Mr. Mercury — who died of AIDS-related complications at 45 in 1991 — and the actor who plays him, Rami Malek, the Emmy ...
Film Review: 'Bohemian Rhapsody'
Film Review: 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Reviewed at Regal Union Square, New York, Oct. 7, 2018. MPAA Rating: PG-13. ... For all your negative reviews the movie won best Movie and Malek won best Actor ...
'Bohemian Rhapsody' and 'Green Book' Share ...
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was named best drama, leaving "A Star Is Born," the expected front-runner, with a lone Globe for best song. Among the other surprises, the veteran Glenn Close beat Lady ...
Film review: Bohemian Rhapsody
Bohemian Rhapsody could, for much of the running time, be about an indie band that scored one top-10 single. Mercury rising. But stick with it. With all due respect to May, Taylor and Deacon, the ...
Bohemian Rhapsody (film)
Bohemian Rhapsody is a 2018 biographical musical drama film that focuses on the life of Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the British rock band Queen, from the formation of the band in 1970 to their 1985 Live Aid performance at the original Wembley Stadium.It was directed by Bryan Singer from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten, and produced by Graham King and Queen manager Jim Beach.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Watch Bohemian Rhapsody with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video. Bohemian Rhapsody hits a handful of high notes, but as an in-depth look at a ...
'Bohemian Rhapsody' Review
'Bohemian Rhapsody': Film Review. Rami Malek stars as Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' a biopic tracing the British rock quartet's first 15 years.
Bohemian Rhapsody review: Indeed a killer Queen biopic
Bohemian Rhapsody, much like the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton did for NWA, will introduce Queen to a new audience while easily elevating the band's rock god status even higher. Even under ...
'Bohemian Rhapsody'
Summary. Bohemian Rhapsody tells the dramatised history of the influential British rock band, Queen, with the limelight focused firmly on the late frontman, Freddie Mercury. I may like electronic or industrial music now, and I may have listened to little but Paul Simon as a kid, but the music of Queen joined the dots for me at every stage of ...
How Close Does 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Come to Showing the Real Freddie
Bohemian Rhapsody will probably not rock you if film critics have anything to say about the new Queen biopic that sees Rami Malek tug on the tight leather pants of Freddie Mercury, the band's ...
'Bohemian Rhapsody' Review: Rami Malek Will Rock You
In struggling to make a salable PG-13 movie out of an R-rated rock life, Bohemian Rhapsody leaves you feeling that something essential and elemental is missing. Thankfully, there's the music ...
Film review: Bohemian Rhapsody
Bohemian Rhapsody, an eight-year abomination in the making (directors and stars have come and gone, scripts have been chopped, diced and sautéd) cannot claim to have achieved even wiki-movie ...
Bohemian Rhapsody at 40: What Critics Said About the Song
October 30, 2015 12:00 PM EDT. T he song "Bohemian Rhapsody"-which was released 40 years ago, Oct. 31, 1975-did not appear destined for the hit parade. It was, in TIME's words, "a six ...
'Bohemian Rhapsody' Tops Box Office ...
The film received a somewhat lackluster reception from critics. It holds a 60 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and in his review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott called it a "plodding ...
Bohemian Rhapsody reviews praise Rami Malek in Freddie Mercury biopic
"Bohemian Rhapsody is a glorified Wikipedia entry," The New York Times' Kyle Buchanan tweeted, though he — like other critics who shared somewhat negative responses to the film itself ...
Bohemian Rhapsody Movie vs the True Story of Freddie Mercury & Queen
New York City, New York, USA. Mary Austin Born: 1951 ... No. The Bohemian Rhapsody movie has Freddie meeting his future girlfriend Mary Austin just before his first run-in with Brian May and Roger Taylor, at which point he becomes a member of the band. This is a departure from the true story. ... In an interview Hutton did with The Times of ...
The Most Brutal Reviews For Bohemian Rhapsody So Far
But it was The New York Times critic A.O. Scott whose review fired lethal shots at the film. " Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie about Queen, lasts more than two hours, not a very long time by modern ...
Bohemian Rhapsody Review
Bohemian Rhapsody covers 15 years of history with great speed, but little detail. ... The New Apes Movie Is Still An Emotional Spectacle. ... , New York, NY 10036. ...
He Sounds Just Like Freddie Mercury. And That's ...
Marc Martel is a vocal doppelgänger for the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. It's brought him international fans, live gigs and subtle screen time in "Bohemian Rhapsody.". Eric Ryan Anderson ...
Movie Review: An Insight into "Bohemian Rhapsody"
The movie illustrated Queen in a positive and fun way, the audience wishing they were actually attending a Queen concert. 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was even inclusive of the darker side of Queen's history, such as when Mercury passed away due to AIDS in 1991. Every moment, from the start of the band's career to the very end of it, was ...
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