“It takes a village to make me look dope,” says Andy Samberg as popstar Conner4Real, the central figure in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping — the Bieber/everyone-else-in-pop-skewering comedy from Lonely Islanders Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. In the first, NSFW trailer released today, we indeed see a great deal of the characters that make up that village, and they all look pretty dope as well.
The film’s official description says “the comedy goes behind the scenes as singer/rapper Conner4Real faces a crisis of popularity after his sophomore album flops, leaving his fans, sycophants and rivals all wondering what to do when he’s no longer the dopest star of all.” But the trailer itself focuses more on the Connor and the personalities he surrounds himself with rather than his career crisis. Aside from the fact that he has rivals like Charlie Sheen and fans like Simon Cowell and Usher, we get a thorough introduction to Conner’s publicist, played by Sarah Silverman, who claims she’d “like to get Conner to the point where he’s everywhere, like oxygen or gravity or clinical depression — he’s just everywhere.” Connor also has the holographic support of multiple Adam Levines, the verbal support of his lyricist/mask-maker, and the emotional tooting support of a personal bagpiper. But perhaps most exciting among the people in his life are the two who’re the most disguised, Bill Hader and Joanna Newsom:
Left: Bill Hader, Right: Joanna Newsom
Hader plays Conner’s roadie whose “favorite free time thing is flatlining,” while Newsom, virtuosic harpist/writer of winding sad songs about time and loss, appears as his blue-haired steampunk-ish doctor who defibrillates him every time he flatlines, and checks in, as a seeming routine, on whether or not he “shit his pants this time.”