A film Freddie would have liked

Rating: 7/10 (16 February 2019)

My acquaintance with Queen was in the mid-90's, when I was in middle school, it became my first real music passion and still has a tender spot in my heart. So forgive me if I'm a little biased...
Still, I think Bohemian Rhapsody is a film Freddie really deserves. Not a massive and monumentally serious biopic, with lots of interviews with the band members, friends, relatives and whatnot. But a true "live fast, die young" flick. One in which it doesn't matter how closely the actors look to their real-life prototypes, how correctly the plot follows the truth of the story and how blatantly it uses the archive sound instead of making some of its own.
This is not about Queen. Queen is four people, and we'd need way more time to look into their lives and their heads to make it substantial, and such substance, in addition to the remaining trio's old and gaunt faces, would be just boring, if not miserable. And Queen was never like that.
So this is a hymn to Freddie himself. Not to the pop culture icon he's become in our eyes, but to the person he's been offstage. The vulnerable and sensitive, but nonetheless flamboyant and daring and believing that punching a hole in the sky was his true and only purpose. Even if half of the events of this film are pure fiction, even if all of it's invented just to give us a taste of what it could possibly have been, that divine flame we could feel within that person is still genuine enough to justify the whole endeavor.
...In that almost academic and definitely too prudent Queen story I read as a kid, they said Freddie could've possibly lived longer - if only he resorted to serious treatment, pressure chambers and so on. But that would mean stomping on the way he lived - and turning into a house-dwelling fungus, just to survive some more. So he decided to burn out but remain who he was, until he wasn't. In that sense, putting the last period in this story right after Live Aid, without six more years and two more albums, follows the same way Freddie would've respected. Not waiting for the last flame to die out but to go with a bang. So that we don't cry that it's over, but that we smile that it happened.
And for all that happened, Freddie and the rest of the guys, I thank you all.