Unless you’re writing history, the small details shouldn’t necessarily stand in the way of larger truths or even a good story. Despite many errors, Bohemian Rhapsody tells an entertaining story about its subject, singer Freddie Mercury, and represents many truths about the era of his band, Queen.
Rami Malek plays Mercury, taking him from the awkward, long-haired kid handling baggage at Heathrow (1970) through his leather-bar Adonis look at Live Aid (1985). At every stage—early or late, public or private—Malek renders a believable portrait of a man brimming with ideas and ambition. Mercury aimed for the stars. His operatic sense of pathos and comedy was evident years before he recorded the song that gives the film its name.
A Parsee refugee who fled Zanzibar with his family, Mercury was, like Bob Dylan or Jay Gatsby, a self-creation. Bohemian Rhapsody shows the tight-knit ethnic family, the doting mother and disapproving father who demands that his son make something of himself. Rock star was not on dad’s mind, and for his son, the straight-and-narrow looked like a dead end.
As with most facets of Mercury’s life, Bohemian Rhapsody touches lightly on the father-son conflict and rolls forward with an agreeable rhythm. Like most screenwriters tasked with distilling a complicated life into a two-hour movie, Anthony McCarten boils all developments down to a set of memorable incidents that probably never happened. However, his screenplay conveys an understanding for the wider meaning of it all. Little period details are nailed: the crates of LPs, the long-distance calls from payphones while on tour, the glamorous discovery that women’s clothes can flatter a well-kept male body.
Some of the critics taking Bohemian Rhapsody to task for inaccuracy sound like the reviewer who responds to Hamilton by insisting that George Washington never rapped. Much of Bohemian Rhapsody could easily be transformed to the musical stage. It has the cues, the pace of Broadway—that urge to break out in song and dance (albeit director Bryan Singer never takes the story down that path). And, like the great musicals West Side Story and Hamilton, the razzmatazz of Bohemian Rhapsody is undercut by tragedy.
One through-line in the film is Mercury’s love for Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), which coincided with his desire for men. He found beauty wherever he saw it and emerged in a period of glamorous ambiguity, a milieu where sexual singlemindedness was not an issue. A gay subtext was already in plain view on Queen’s early albums (most of their 1970s American fans didn’t see it), powered in large part by the symphonic grandeur of Brian May’s guitar playing and the exuberant joy that infused their songs and performance. Bohemian Rhapsody gets that.
