Abel Tesfaye, playing a fictionalized version of himself and his stage persona The Weekend, is in the middle of a massive tour, while balancing multiple personal crises, namely a nasty breakup with his girlfriend and a muscle tension diagnosis that threatens his voice.  Elsewhere, Anima (Jenna Ortega), a big fan of The Weekend, sets a farmhouse a blaze and frantically flees the scene.  Sneaking into the restricted access area of one of The Weekend’s shows, she meets Abel in the walkways after he left the stage in a panic, and together they embark on an overnight frenzy. 

Trey Edward Shults directs and edits Hurry Up Tomorrow from a script he co-wrote with Tesfaye and Reza Fahim for Lionsgate.  The paranoia thriller runs a bloated 105 minutes as it often hits back on the same few notes of the struggle of celebrity while offering too little introspection to please the thrill seekers and too little music to please the vibe seekers.  The late night odyssey and the pulsing stage lights juxtaposed with the sleek, black mirrored walls of the green room, however, lend themselves well to Chayse Irvin’s camera so the film is almost always exciting to look at, even if it leaves audiences craving more of anything beyond the vague notion of The Passion of Abel. 

To Tesfaye’s credit, he proves willing to tear down his vanity and present a version of himself that is not the glitzy, megawatt star as others may have opted to present themselves in a film in which they are directly playing themselves and not just walking the tightrope of allusion and subtext.  Instead, this is a character who is clearly struggling with their fame and its impact on their personal life; a nonmutual breakup leaves the performer raw, getting by on a mix of drugs and Lee (Barry Keoghan), his managers, effusive praise.  We see behind the curtain into Abel’s process as he hypes himself up for a show lifting weights in front of the mirror, and later, on the precipice of a crash, screaming into a voice mail box that will surely go irately ignored.  With all of the access we are granted, however, there is an overwhelming feeling of artifice.  Sure, Hurry Up Tomorrow is not and never was framed as a documentary- rather a companion film for The Weekend’s latest album of the same name – but the line between fact and fiction is strangely traversed as it tries to build Abel up as a sympathetic character. There is such an awareness on the performer’s part that this is being filmed that the project never shakes the feeling of being an ego trip. 

Beyond Tesfaye, and sitting on Abel’s shoulder as a bit of both the angel and the devil is Lee.  Keoghan, in his slimmer role, ends up being the most captivating of the main three characters despite the script heavily favoring the Abel and Anima.  Lee ends up being on the most fully realized characters even without the breathing room needed to become a major player; he is alluded to being a driving force in Abel’s early stages of his career, and a debt of loyalty is still being paid by both of them to each other as he gave up everything to help promote the budding star some years prior.  It is a rather grounded character for Keoghan, but the actor finds a desperation that allows the performance to be charged with some electricity which is surprisingly lacking across the film despite the score and strobing lights. 

The most confounding piece in this tryptic, though, comes from Ortega as Anima, the manic pixie nightmare girl that calls out to Abel like a siren.  Alluring in moments on the page, the actress struggles to breathe any real life into the character on screen, though through no real fault of her own.  There is a parallel here loosely at play – and perhaps, entirely by accident – at how addiction harms those around the addict just as much as it harms themselves.  Hurry Up Tomorrow, though, is not interested in exploring those themes, rather it just wants to hurry up to show more of Anima and Abel embarking on their midnight crusade to nowhere.  It is all empty images, never quite building up to anything greater, and while both Tesfaye and Keoghan are afforded a little more framework on the page to build a character, Ortega is left holding the bag, looking wide-eyed at Abel, and Abel, through a sense of shrugged desperation of his own, allows her into his orbit.  Once there, though, she has very little planned, perhaps because she never expected this kind of access to her idol in the first place, but she dances to a couple of his early hits, talks poetically about how deep and insightful the lyrics are, and then through some timeline trickery Abel is back in his green room preparing to perform with lessons we understand have been learned simply because of the narrative structure but doubtful that anything stuck on a character level; sound and fury, signifying nothing.