Depending on who you ask, Abel Tesfaye — better known by his stage name, The Weeknd — is either a poetic musical genius or a drug-addled lothario. To his credit, this duality is Tesfaye’s doing. He’s spent the better part of the last decade intentionally blurring the lines between his musical persona and his real-life nature. Once a smooth-talking R&B singer with a baby-soft voice to match, his increasing popularity saw his art become outsized, more grandiose. The emotions were buried under witch house trip-hop and then stuffed behind the impenetrable cool of glittering '80s synths. A musician became a pop star, and suddenly, it was difficult for people to see where Tesfaye ended and the Weeknd began.
If Tesfaye’s new film, “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” is to be believed, the singer has been struggling just as much with reconciling that dissonance as his adoring public has. The movie, directed by Trey Edward Shults, is a fictionalized odyssey through a version of The Weeknd suffering from a bout of insomnia during a world tour, causing his sanity to come undone. Along the way, a young girl named Anima (Jenna Ortega) is pulled into Tesfaye’s orbit, and her creeping, obsessive adoration threatens the singer’s chronic detachment.
