Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) ****

Queen is one of those bands that it's easy to take for granted. Their music has been around my entire life, and even now, at any given moment, I guarantee you there's a Queen song playing on a classic rock station somewhere. I can remember my delight at discovering certain of their songs, like “Fat-Bottomed Girls” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” while other songs, like “We Will Rock You,” just feel like they have always been out there in the background somewhere.

A music biopic is a great way to showcase an old artist's music and get you to take a new look at it, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” is one of the best I have seen. Much like 1991's “The Doors,” the film gives us access to moments of creation for songs that are so ubiquitous that we may have assumed they always existed.

The film starts with Freddie Mercury fortuitously meeting guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor right after they lost the lead singer of their struggling band. Impressed with his voice, they offer Freddy a spot, and the rest, as they say, is history. Re-dubbed “Queen,” after Her Royal Majesty, the band slowly worked its way to the top with its unique, operatic, rock stylings.

As much as the music, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is about Freddie Mercury, presenting his life as a constant struggle against loneliness and isolation. He was the child of Farsi Zoroastrians from Zanzibar. His people were a religious minority chased out of Iran by the Muslims, so there is basically nowhere on earth where Mercury could truly fit in. Growing up in England, people simply called him a “Paki.” Later in his life, his homosexuality made him an outsider.

Speaking of Mercury's sexuality, there has been some bitching among the chattering class that the film glosses over his gayness or is homophobic in some way. I'm not sure what movie they were watching. For most of the film, Mercury is as openly gay as any artist was allowed to be in the 1970s and 80s, and the movie concludes with him entering into a relationship with his long-term partner Jim Hutton. I guess you just can't satisfy people who are obsessed with identity politics.

For the rest of us, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a true delight, reintroducing great music and great musicians. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll bang your head!

4 stars out of 5