“I was born with four additional incisors. More space in my mouth means more range.” One wonders if this is how Freddie Mercury really persuaded the band that would become Queen to take him on as lead singer. In Bohemian Rhapsody it does the job, in one of several short scenes of mega-exposition, the best of which comes close to the end, when Freddie tells the band he has Aids, gets a boyfriend, comes out to his parents and plays Live Aid on what appears to be the same afternoon. Teeth figure a lot in the movie– the actor playing Freddie, Rami Malek, carried a set of falsies around for many months to get into character, and Roger Taylor, the script makes clear twice, was studying dentistry when they all met. Brian, of course, was doing astrophysics: “I guess that makes you the clever one,” says Freddie. “I guess so,” says Brian, one of the film’s producers.
Brian May’s speaking voice (he is played by Gwilym Lee) is so shockingly accurate, I thought he was dubbed with the real thing – and he could be, for who knows what sonic trickery Roger and Brian, the executive music producers, got up to in the studio: Malek’s singing is blended with Freddie’s in parts, and with a Canadian singer called Marc Martel. I just left the film, and my head is still spinning. Its script is an alchemy of the bizarre and the banal. There are some physical impressions so accurate they give you chills. There is some deeply dodgy poetic licence. And there is, predictably, very good use of music. The greatest challenge of any rock biopic, and the reason so many of them fail, is getting the rights to the songs. If the band make the film that’s not a problem. But leave a rock band as private and controlling as Queen to tell their own story and you have another problem entirely. Bohemian Rhapsody lost spangly directors and stars along the way, and at one point looked like it would never be made. Sacha Baron Cohen, who was once down to play a very tall Freddie, was later described by Brian May as an arse.
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