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.

While some sequences are visually arresting, they offer the casual viewer, one who isn’t a diehard Weeknd fan, little to no insight into this world. Even an enthusiast of Tesfaye’s music is unlikely to get anything more from this than they would just spinning one of his albums top to bottom. 

With an assist from Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan as Tesfaye’s manager Lee, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” feels intended to be an event movie, a spectacular study of pop stardom with the big names to back it up. But even with its admirable ambition, the film quickly gets lost in its own myth-making — if you can even call “Hurry Up Tomorrow” a film at all. What’s seemingly designed to be a feature-length glimpse into a world-famous musician’s psyche functions like little more than an extended music video, too sparse on dialogue and plot to be a properly engrossing cinematic experience. And just when it feels like things are getting somewhere, when it appears as though there might be a kernel of introspection to take away from the movie, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” bungles its grand finale with all of the subtlety of a badly written pop song.

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