Credit where it’s due: Hurry Up Tomorrow is the sort of fiasco that Canadian pop superstar The Weeknd has been concertedly building toward over several years, connecting a series of personally revealing yet increasingly misguided projects, before finally arriving at this film, his magnum opus of solipsism. There’s nothing accidental or unsurprising about the film if you’ve been following along, other than perhaps the realization that the multi-platinum artist and sex symbol is entirely undeterred by toxic buzz or highly visible failures. Rather, as evidenced by Hurry Up Tomorrow, he seems to feed off of them, doubling down on his most self-destructive impulses and following his muse straight into a creative and commercial ditch. It all demonstrates a level of misplaced self-confidence shared by the brilliant and the delusional alike. The film itself would be almost admirable in its nakedly confessional and self-excoriating qualities if only it weren’t so derivative, shallow, and dull.
The Weeknd, billed here under his real name of Abel Tesfaye, didn’t technically direct Hurry Up Tomorrow — that distinction goes to the formerly ascendent Trey Edward Shults (Krisha, Waves) — but his creative imprimatur is all over the film. Hurry Up Tomorrow begins with a fictionalized version of Tesfaye mid-tour, as well as mid-mental breakdown, troubled by both strained vocal cords that imperil his sold-out arena tour and a bad breakup with an old girlfriend (Riley Keough, fleetingly seen and heard in cell phone photos and voicemails) that consumes his every waking moment. Constantly in the company of his manager/one-man support system Lee (Barry Keoghan), who tries to distract him from his heartache by regularly plying him with coke and booze, Abel is on the verge of spinning out. He needs to be coaxed — via several bumps of nose candy — to emerge from the fetal position and even perform in front of thousands of adoring fans, and against all better judgement, he keeps leaving increasingly unhinged messages for his ex (this is the sort of film where “I love you” is often screamed in a threatening manner). Even as one of the most successful artists in the world — and with that comes the attendant private jets, drug-fueled parties, and abundant groupies — Abel remains an exposed nerve of self-loathing and doubt.
Into Abel’s life enters Anima (Jenna Ortega), a name that should send antennas twitching for those versed in psychology and put attentive viewers on guard for what’s to come. A firebug who’s introduced burning down her childhood home, Anima traverses the country, pulling penny ante schemes to survive while evading the law, yet she still finds herself in the front row of a The Weeknd concert where Abel locks eyes with her from the stage. After a confluence of events finds Abel abandoning his set in the middle of his opening number and Anima sneaking past security and descending in the bowels of the arena, the two characters run into one another (literally) and there’s an instant attraction. Evading Lee and the throngs of staff tasked with keeping tabs on him, Abel and Anima run off into the night for an idyllic and anonymous (when it’s convenient for the film’s needs, it’s suddenly Halloween, which allows Tesfaye to engage in his love of masks) evening spent riding roller coasters on the Santa Monica pier and closing out bars. Later, the duo retreat to a hotel suite where Abel plays Anima an unfinished song off of his phone, which naturally brings her to tears and serves as a prelude to lovemaking. But in the cold light of day, with the crushing reality of his celebrity and his financial obligations hanging over him — he’s meant to get on a plane to fly to Australia for the next stop on the tour — Abel’s polite attempts to rebuff Anima are met with rage and violence, ushering him into an extended lucid nightmare where he’s a prisoner of his neurosis and his life hangs in the balance.
For Tesfaye, Hurry Up Tomorrow follows in the footsteps of HBO’s short-lived, critically reviled series The Idol — as well as several head-scratching, cross-media projects including a much-memed Super Bowl halftime performance and designing a Halloween-themed haunted house for Universal Studios’ theme parks — that seemed to exist for the express purposes of presenting the soft-spoken singer as a sexually domineering megalomaniac whose more loathsome qualities are mitigated by his undeniable brilliance. There’s a pronounced lack of self-regard to the entire “The Weeknd experience” that goes hand in hand with embracing the ugly and abusive side of fame; it all flies in the face of the trend of overly-massaged, controversy-averse pop stars. It’s performance art as personal therapy on a grand scale, and certainly that remains the case with Hurry Up Tomorrow, which finds the musician ensnared by his hubris and callousness, confronted by his mistreatment of women and insecurity about his bona fides as an artist. For all of its failings, however, it’s not strictly accurate to call the film a vanity project. Quite the opposite: the film practically functions as a public flaying that you could dance to.
It’s a pity, then, that everything about the execution is so lame. The film functions as a remedial exploration of Tesfaye’s psyche, dolloping horror tropes onto its threadbare framework and facile ideas. Abel’s unsettling dreams find the singer, who in life is constantly surrounded by admirers and hangers-on, running through an abandoned metropolitan in a sequence that plays like a budget-version of Vanilla Sky‘s opening. Anima literally takes a flame to the symbols of her past without looking back, has a complicated relationship with her mother (a trait she pointedly shares with Abel), and comes to represent Abel’s pattern of idealizing women and then disposing of them like a used condom. During the film’s centerpiece, which finds Abel forcibly confined to a bed like James Caan in Misery, Anima taunts him by interpreting the autobiographical qualities of the lyrics to the songs “Blinding Lights” and “Gasoline” while pointing out that The Weeknd’s most recent album didn’t sell as well as his earlier ones did. The film’s existential crisis is kicked off by a mental block that finds the musician unable to sing, and so naturally the key to his liberation is embracing the void and rediscovering his voice. Hurry Up Tomorrow finds Tesfaye working through his personal demons (either actual or those he wishes to publicly project), but in the absence of anything to grab hold of, it ends up dropping all this personal psychodrama directly onto the surface. No amount of camera tricks, affluence porn, or the constant specter of violence can conceal how overwhelmingly basic and plodding this all is.
As if to compensate, Shults’ over-aestheticizes the film, piling on red and blue gels, staging elaborate 360° movements, long unbroken takes, and shooting in varying aspect ratios and film stocks. It’s all superficially handsome and unmoored to coherence or logic the way a music video might be, only without the advantage of also only being four minutes. And then there’s the insurmountable problem of building a film around Tesfaye, who even playing a version of himself comes across ill at ease on camera. A void of charisma when he’s not on stage, Tesfaye’s onscreen persona is stilted and vacant. The singer goes through the motions of playing a tormented soul undone by the pressures of the spotlight and his fleeting devotion to “unworthy” women, but it all plays as an imitative pantomime of roiling discontent. In truth, what the film most evokes, with its casual misogyny, exhibitionist tendencies, and wooden multi-hyphenate leading man at its center, is Tommy Wiseau’s shlock-disasterpiece The Room. Hurry Up Tomorrow inadvertently answers the question of what that film might have been like if it had a competent cinematographer and a soundtrack of wall-to-wall bangers. There’s a masochism to the way the film invites derision, as though scorn and indifference are just another station in Tesfaye’s baptism by fire. But if The Weeknd really wanted to publicly humiliate himself by blowing up his public persona and laying bare his sexual peccadilloes, he could have saved himself a lot of time, energy, and money by just following the lead of another famous Canadian artist and simply picked a fight with Kendrick Lamar.
DIRECTOR: Trey Edward Shults; CAST: Abel “The Weekend” Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan, Paul L. Davis; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: May 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
Comments are closed.