It seems fitting that the guys from The Lonely Island, who basically invented our viral culture (it’s true! look it up!) would make a film about a Justin Bieber-meets-Macklemore pop-rapper, who went from YouTube star to international celebrity. Conner (Andy Samberg) started out goofing around with his buddies Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer) and Owen (Jorma Taccone) in a boy band they called The Style Boyz. But because he was the lead singer—and the cutest—Conner was put front and center in photoshoots and interviews, and eventually broke out on his own, as Conner4Real. Lawrence, who had served as the band’s lyricist, severed all ties with Conner (and ended up growing a Unabomber beard and living on a pot farm), but Owen stayed on as Conner’s (much suffering) DJ. Meanwhile, Conner4Real became the Full Bieber, complete with a fawning entourage (populated by enough black people to give him street cred), an exotic pet (a big turtle named Maximus), a giant party house with a pool and flashy cars, and Conner’s own faux-sincere declarations about how much he loves his fans. (From his name down, the completely commodified Conner is obsessed with “keeping it real”.)
The mockumentary-style film focuses mostly on the release of Conner’s second album, Connquest, which Conner largely wrote on his own (along with the help of about 100 producers) and which is undeniably awful. Of course, Lonely Island’s music has always been both objectively bad and unnervingly catchy—they take pop music to its absurdist extreme, but also manage to show just how easy it is to create an earworm. If anything, one of the faults of Popstar is that Conner’s second album objectively seems no better or worse than his first one (or of the Style Boyz songs which the film holds up as products of a purer time). Still, the songs are all hilarious—including one that calls the Mona Lisa a “basic bitch” and another one that passionately advocates for gay marriage, while repeatedly assuring audiences that he, Conner4Real, is “not gay.” (“He doesn’t seem to realize that gay marriage has been legalized,” notes one observer.)
The film is absolutely packed with cameos—from interviews with Conner4Real admirers like Usher, Simon Cowell, Questlove, and DJ Khaled, to Justin Timberlake as Conner’s fastidious cook, to Maya Rudoph as the brand genius who decided to embed Conner’s album in new refrigerators and ovens (shades of the new U2 album being forced on everyone’s iPhone.)
One of my favorite recurring bits involved Will Arnett as the head of a gossip site called CMZ, perfectly mimicking the loathsome Harvey Levin as he hangs over an office partition sucking on a Big Gulp and egging his staff on to be even more cruel and mocking of the celebrities they cover.
Popstar’s targets—celebrity culture, cultural appropriation, male insecurity— are little too obvious. It’s the comedy version of shooting fish in a barrel. But at 90 minutes, it’s just the right length—and consistently hilarious. Or to borrow the film’s parlance: It never stops not stopping being funny.