Of all the aspects of film that have disappeared since the supposed death of the movie star, unbridled egomania is perhaps the most pronounced. An undoubted product of the internet age, our current marque names tend to dole out their vanity more judiciously than their predecessors, lest the hordes of social media jokesters get their hands on some particularly juicy material. The likes of John Wayne, Robert Redford, and Brad Pitt defined themselves with omnipresent preening and galavanting, though had their careers started under 2025’s withering microscope, one imagines a little more modesty would have come into play. The scourge of false humility has yet to infest hip hop or R&B, where simple lyrics don’t possess the same cringe factor that’s inherent to all filmed entertainment, a distinction that seems to have evaded both Abel Tesfaye and everyone involved with his woebegone star-making vehicle, Hurry Up Tomorrow. Lambasted by critics and ignored by audiences, it’s the type of movie that’s primed to quickly be forgotten outside of an occasional TikTok tar-and-feathering, but dismissing it as a simple misfire does a disservice to the unfathomable level of self-importance on display. Some crime scenes are best left to the experts to interpret; this one deserves the fine tooth comb of the masses.

The intrigue and carnage implied by that last sentence are nowhere to be found throughout the first hour of director Trey Edward Shults’ fourth feature, which seems entirely oblivious to its own glaringly low stakes. In a rare form of auto fiction designed and deployed by a person already at the center of our pop cultural firmament, Tesfaye declines to invent a new alter ego, instead playing The Weeknd, the weary lothario character the singer has been propping up since the late aughts. Introduced backstage before peddling his talents in front of a rapturous audience, our honey-voiced hellion is mired in a familiar mess of his own making, sweaty and bug-eyed after years of abusing both women and substances. His comeuppance comes in the form of damaged vocal chords, a light penance that Tesfaye and co-screenwriters Shults and Reza Fahim treat with the reverence of original sin when a subsequent live performance goes awry. Their unearned pity is shared by Anima (Jenna Ortega), a mysterious fan girl who arrives on the scene as though compelled by fate.

What The Weeknd doesn’t know will hurt him, though the audience has been primed for Anima’s dangerous insurgency, having already witnessed Ortega burn down her childhood home in the film’s early goings. The sequence, which is cross cut with Tesfaye’s tour date, is thrilling to behold, benefiting from a lack of dialogue and an avalanche of optical and auditory razzle dazzle. Shooting on film, the enveloping pockmarks of Chayse Irvin’s cinematography situate the viewer in a 1970’s headspace, though his forebears could only dream of the agility that modern cameras allow. The lens whips and whirls, all while the textured, foreboding sound design tightens its grip around the eardrums, an instance of style ethically overtaking substance. Like a beautiful person whose attractiveness wanes the moment that words enter the equation, Hurry Up Tomorrow is all aces until it opens its mouth. At least the speakers are enticing.

Barry Keoghan sure knows his way around tripe, Saltburn having bolstered both his fame and reputation despite being entirely underbaked and desperate for attention. His turn here seems destined for similar plaudits, playing The Weeknd’s longtime friend and ill-intentioned manager with a gusto and vibrancy that affords the film some buoyancy. He’s a livewire of villainy, and while Tesfaye is a surprisingly adept actor, he can’t help but shrink in his co-star’s considerable shadow. At least he doesn’t go down quietly, screaming and swearing his way through a turn that treats subtlety like the enemy. Being broad and being bad are not the same thing, a truth to which Ortega can readily attest. She’s largely here for visual purposes, as well as a climactic scene that will be interrogated later, but she wears the manic-pixie-dream-girl-from-hell archetype like it was tailored to her person. It’s not like she has anything else going on.

The property damage that opens the movie will have to serve as character development, because Hurry Up Tomorrow is regrettably incurious as to her backstory, though that’s hardly unique here. An early scene in which Keoghan pumps his meal ticket with both praise and hard drugs stands out as a fleeting detour into personal history, as the rest of the flick charts chaos and harm without the slightest interest in interrogation. It’s not uncommon to champion a protagonist with dubious morals and self-destructive reflexes, but there’s usually something that aligns us with their struggles. The Weeknd might be a victim of his own making, but the why and how of his beastly manner are conspicuously unaddressed. We’re apparently meant to have sympathy, though Tomorrow shows us nothing worth liking.

Any form of relatable pain and nuance will have to be found in the lyrics, a doomed quest that Anima embarks on in what might end up being the most memorable thing committed to celluloid all year. It’s entirely too delicious to spoil, but involves Ortega directly confronting Tesfaye with his own music, furthering the torment brought upon the singer by his own success. Whether the aim was pure pathos or something more satirical, the end result blows past the boundaries of store-brand narcissism into a realm of awe-inspiring solipsism. If it really is The Weeknd’s world and we’re all just living in it, there’s something majestic in how unconcerned he is about our collective opinion. Poor taste is more than capable of cooking up a fine dish, and for about seven breathless minutes, we’re treated to a filet mignon.

All that medium rare goodness will only prove appetizing to those with the stomach for ruthlessly pure and uncut self-aggrandizement, a proposition that only gets trickier when you consider its messenger. Courting hero worship is still alive at your local multiplex, with Tom Cruise prepared to test your undying loyalty with yet another Impossible outing this weekend, and Bradley Cooper’s every movement providing fertile ground for armchair psychology. The difference is in the narrator, both because The Weeknd doesn’t seem to have the zeitgeist impact that his streaming numbers would suggest, and due to his refusal to hide behind the supposedly requisite veneer. It was clear as day throughout A Star is Born and Maestro that Cooper was tangling with his own demons, but he’s never played someone named Bradley Cooper, who’s behaving disastrously as Bradley Cooper, whose trails come as a result of being Bradley Cooper, and who should be regarded with patience and empathy… because he’s Bradley Cooper.

Scorn and dismissal were always the most likely outcome here, which makes Shults’ attachment pretty hard to bear. His previous movie, Waves, still stands as one of the most criminally underrated and underseen films of the 21st century, a melodrama bursting at the seams with both enveloping aesthetic beauty and towering emotionality. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a wasteland in regards to the latter category, but nearly matches its predecessor in the former, and given the comprehensive nature of the medium, the sights and sounds here shouldn’t be disregarded out of vitriol for this debacle of a script. Shults is a vital voice who should be protected at all costs, even if it means carrying water for a hitmaker who’s positively drowning in his own supply. For the sickos out there who enjoy watching vaingloriousness spin wildly out of control, this shouldn’t even be a problem. Everyone knows what happened to Icarus when he flew too close to the sun; don’t you want to know what it looks like when someone sails straight into our brightest star?