Beneath the lurid adrenaline of the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” which Billboard classified as the No. 1 song of all time in 2021, is really a story of emptiness, explains Anima (Jenna Ortega). A superfan of the singer, she tells this to the Weeknd (a.k.a. Abel Tesfaye) himself — while his hands are bound to the bedposts in a hotel room.
Like an acid-trip pop-star spin on Stephen King’s “Misery,” this sequence from “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” a filmic companion to Tesfaye’s latest album (supposedly his final one as the Weeknd), is in some ways the most apt manifestation of the story his music has always circled around: the devil’s bargain of fame, the hedonism that offers a fun-house portal to self-oblivion.
But the film, directed by Trey Edward Shults, who wrote the screenplay with Tesfaye, primarily amounts to an overextended music video that shrinks and cheapens the universe that the Weeknd’s songs gesture toward. Tesfaye plays himself as a heartbroken superstar who exists in a seemingly perpetual bender alongside his best friend and manager, Lee (Barry Keoghan). After losing his voice onstage during a show (based on Tesfaye’s real experience), he finds solace in Anima, a mysterious girl in the crowd, whose obsession with him plunges him into a kind of ego-death horror show.
This would all seem to make for a proper farewell to a musical identity that has always gravitated toward the darkly cinematic. It was in the alt-R&B sound he helped pioneer and the shadowy persona he cultivated; the conceptual trilogy of his latest three albums all featured a distinct protagonist traversing underworlds and afterlives (and, at one point, winding up with a bandaged nose à la Jack Nicholson’s private eye in “Chinatown”).
But that kind of scene-setting sensibility in music doesn’t provide enough meat for the actual human drama that fuels feature-length storytelling. Ironically, the perfect — or worst, depending on how you see it — person to tell this to Tesfaye would be Shults, whose last feature, “Waves,” was, despite its big feelings and contrived traumas, built mainly as a stylized container for the movie’s soundtrack.
Together, the pair have brought out the worst impulses in each other, making a psycho thriller whose paper-thin narrative is driven by aesthetics, along with the juvenile belief that the more overtly twisted things look and sound, the deeper the ideas. This applies even to Tesfaye’s acting, which, while at times workable, appears to be guided by the notion that good acting requires a lot (truly, a lot) of scenes with tears rolling down cheeks.
What we’re left with is mostly just atmosphere, vaguely heightened sketches of characters and a faint allegory about the dark side of stardom — all the ingredients that might work in the visceral and evocative world of Tesfaye’s videos, but not in a movie. Underneath the blinding lights, the Weeknd has always told us, is a hollow core. In that regard, the movie has mirrored the music.
Hurry Up Tomorrow
Rated R for language, drug use, some bloody violence and brief nudity. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
