My Dire Melancholy

My thoughts on Hurry Up Tomorrow

Practically from the moment that the movies first began to talk, popular musical acts have attempted to translate their success on the stage and in the recording studio to the big screen and, to put it mildly, the results have been mixed. There have been cases in which the move has worked out, to be sure, but for every one that has pulled it off on a relatively consistent basis, such as Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Lady Gaga, there have been another dozen or so along the lines of Mariah Carey whose one-and-done (if they are smart) efforts have misfired so badly that they have been almost entirely forgotten by those who are not either bad film fanatics or the more masochistic members of their fan bases. Over the years, I have seen any number of these vehicles and while many of them have been messes, I cannot easily recall an attempt as disastrous as Hurry Up Tomorrow, the insanely misguided attempt by enormously popular singer Abel Tesfaye—better known as The Weeknd—to make it as a movie star. Put it this way—this may well be the single most incompetent and ill-advised project along these lines to somehow actually make it into theaters and bear in mind, I once paid money to see Give My Regards to Broad Street, a barely-remembered 1984 Paul McCartney vanity project that nevertheless comes across like A Hard Day’s Night when compared to this thing.

Although most of Hurry Up Tomorrow remains wildly inexplicable even after viewing it, it does have its roots in two high-profile and fairly disastrous events in Tesfaye’s otherwise acclaimed career. In 2022, he was doing a concert in Los Angeles when his throat gave out in the middle of his performance, forcing him bring the show to an abrupt end that, thanks to thousands of cellphone videos that hit YouTube, was soon seen around the world. That sort of mishap could be explained but an even bigger stumble occurred the next year with the arrival of The Idol, the heavily-hyped HBO series that he co-created and starred in as a Svengali-like nightclub owner who swoops in to take over the life of an emotionally disturbed pop star (Lily-Rose Depp) that had a long and troubled production history that culminated with it becoming an instant pop-culture punchline when it finally premiered, in no small part due to his woeful attempts at acting. Both of these incidents are referenced—one overtly and one obliquely—over the course of the film but somehow, despite the odds, he has done so in the service of a project that is ultimately an even bigger embarrassment that those two put together.

Here, Tesfaye plays, go figure, Abel Tesfaye, an enormously popular music star known as The Weeknd who, as the film opens, is in the midst of a grueling world tour that has left him disillusioned with his fame, especially in the wake of a recent breakup with an unnamed girlfriend (Riley Keough) who is never seen (except through some old photos) but who is certainly heard, via voicemail messages denouncing him as a horrible person and condemning him for the shitty things that he did to her. Although we never learn exactly what he did to her, the way that he subsequently harangues her through phone calls where he vacillates between begging her to come back and cursing her out as a bitch should put most viewers solidly in her court. Because of this, the sensitive singer worries that his voice is in danger of going out to his friend and manager Lee (Barry Keoghan), who responds by giving him more drugs, booze and affirmations of his genius in order to get him back out on stage.

Intercut with all of this are a number of scenes involving a mysterious young woman named Anima (Jenna Ortega), who, when we first see here, is in the process of burning down a house with gasoline before hitting the road. Perhaps inevitably, she is a massive fan of Abel’s and is driving to L.A. in order to see him in concert. She arrives and while he is on stage performing, their eyes lock and a connection of sorts is instantly made, followed immediately by Abel’s voice going out, just as he had feared. He abandons the show and while running around backstage in an attempt to flee the premises, he literally runs into Anima and the two of them go off into the night.

The two of them spend a long night together that starts with them goofing off at an amusement park (complete with gripping air hockey action) before relocating to a new hotel where Abel plays her the film’s title song and she immediately begins weeping and talking about how “I feel like that song was about me.” Most reasonably sensible people—even those who are dissolute rock icons—might consider such a statement to be an enormous red flag, even coming from someone who looks like Jenna Ortega, but Abel not only lets it pass but makes some offhand comment imploring her to “Don’t leave me.” Alas, the next morning, the spell has broken and he is ready to get back to the grind of being a fabulously wealthy, talented and beloved celebrity, giving her a glib brush off as he tries to leave. This doesn’t set too well with Anima, who proves to be less Penny Lane and more Penny Dreadful as she responds with an attack that plunges him into the imaginary depths of his tortured psyche before waking up to a scene that essentially cribs from both Misery and one of the funniest bits in American Psycho with her tying him to the hotel bed and subjecting him to intense critical analysis of some of his most notable tunes, channeling her inner Lester Bangs by insisting that he be “honest” with her while asking things like “Is this really about a toxic relationship? Are you the toxic one?”

My brief recounting of the plot of Hurry Up Tomorrow may make it sound like a bit of an incoherent mess but trust me, that is nothing compared to watching it unfold before your increasingly incredulous eyes. Three people are credited with the screenplay—Tesfaye, his The Idol co-creator Rena Fahim and Trey Edward Shults (the latter also serving as director)—but all they have come up with here is a half-assed music video/therapy session hybrid that plays like Pink Floyd: The Wall sans the subtlety. It takes seemingly forever to build up even the slightest hint of dramatic steam, ends so abruptly that you might find yourself thinking that a reel got lost along the way (not that you would actually want to seen a longer iteration in this or any subsequent lifetimes) and is centered entirely on a character who is whiny, self-absorbed and, worst of all, extraordinarily boring. His ennui is a mere recapitulation of every tired cliche about tortured artists that we have seen in far better movies than this and while I suppose that it deserves a little credit for explicitly calling out his abusive and misogynistic ways, the script almost immediately goes on to abandon that critique—perhaps not surprising considering that the only female characters of note are the hectoring ex-girlfriend and a psychotic fan—and absolve him of his sins because that toxic behavior has lead to any number of bangers over the years. Frankly, there were more piercing insights into the world of contemporary music and celebrity culture on display in Josie and the Pussycats than there are here and the music was better to boot.

In selecting Shults—who began his career with the overrated but not entirely uninteresting Krishna and went on to include the increasingly tedious likes of It Comes at Night and Waves—as director, Tesfaye was presumably looking for a known indie filmmaking voice to give the endeavor some instant credibility and, perhaps more importantly, deflect accusations that Hurry Up Tomorrow was little more than a vanity project. This is a smart idea in theory but one that results in very little in practice as the film, for all its hyperkinetic visual flailing throughout, is so tedious throughout that it might as well have been slapped together by some anonymous music video hack. There is no sense of pace or flow to the proceedings—despite the rapid cutting throughout, it feels absolutely endless—and Shults never finds a way to organize any of the ideas on display into something even remotely cohesive or consistent. Even taken strictly as eye candy, Shults offers up nothing that is either new or interesting—his idea of of edgy visual styling is to do the whole shifting aspect ratios thing and to throw in enough strobe lighting throughout to require an opening credit card warning to viewers prone to seizures.

And yet, of all the considerable artistic sins on display in Hurry Up Tomorrow, the one that ultimately proves to be the most disastrous is the astonishingly bad performance by Tesfaye, who is essentially playing himself and proves to be not up to the task. As a general rule, one should probably not go into a film featuring a music star taking a shot at acting and expect brilliance—too often, the raw charisma and energy that they demonstrate on the stage and on vinyl withers away when confronted with things like dialogue, cameras and the need to interact with other actors. However, when given the chance to work on a project that knows how to make use of their particular presences—Prince in Purple Rain, Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan and Lady Gaga in A Star is Born come to mind—these performers can connect with viewers in ways that transform and enliven the material in ways that might not have occurred in the hands of conventional actors.

By comparison, Tesfaye seems so disconnected from the proceedings throughout that if it weren’t for the overwhelmingly narcissistic tone that permeates virtually every scene, you might actually feel sorry for him for being stuck in an endeavor in which he is clearly in way over his head. Whatever charisma and intensity he may have as a singer is absent here—he barely seems present most of the time (which is a bit of a hiccup when you are center stage throughout) and in the moments when he attempts to make more of an effort, the results are so cringe-worthy that they many finally replace the various clips of Tommy Wiseau in The Room as the basis for memes meant to represent bad acting. His deficiencies in this department are even more apparent when he is required to appear opposite people like Ortega and Keoghan who actually can act, even though they are pretty much coasting throughout here. Despite being stuck playing against someone who seems incapable of registering that they are actually in the same scene, they are at least bringing some trace of core competence to the proceedings that Tesfaye never manages to muster. Even in the scenes in which we see him performing his songs (which are fewer than you might expect), he is surprisingly unconvincing—although many in the past have compared him to Michael Jackson in terms of his live performances, based on the evidence on display here, he is barely Rockwell.

Hurry Up Tomorrow is such a complete botch that I confess that there is a part of me that almost wants to recommend it, at least to certain viewers, on the basis that they are unlikely to see anything like it on a movie screen anytime in the appreciable future. Most films being made today are so timid in their conception and execution that you rarely get a chance to experience one that flies off the rails as completely as this one does any more. And yet, for all the so-bad-its-good bits that will soon find their way to YouTube before long, even the brief amusement they generate is subsumed by the sense of ego and sheer incoherence that ends up overwhelming everything. Even as an extended informercial for the new Weeknd album, which is what the film, despite its overweening pretentions, ultimately is, Hurry Up Sundown is an utter failure. After going to see most music-related films, many feel the impulse to buy or stream the soundtrack and other works from the artists in question as a way to help prolong and relive the experience that they had in the theater. In this case, my guess is that even the dedicated fans of The Weeknd will come away from it feeling so completely exhausted with him that they will be removing his music from their playlists for the foreseeable future.