Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Post Malone: Runaway’ On Freevee, A Superficial Treatment Of The Slashy Superstar’s First Big Time Tour

Post Malone: Runaway (Freevee) was filmed during the Grammy-nominated, chart-topping singer, rapper, songwriter, and musician’s 2019 tour, which logged 30-plus dates before Spring 2020 and the arrival of COVID. A lot has happened since then – Post Malone added another slash to his hybridist career with acting cameos in Spenser: Confidential and Wrath of Man, he hawked Doritos in a chartreuse Nudie suit, and in June, he released Twelve Carat Toothache, his fourth studio album, which debuted at number two on the Billboard charts and for which Runaway feels like a promotional piece meant to increase visibility.

POST MALONE: RUNAWAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Since his popular emergence in 2015 with the single “White Iverson,” Post Malone has issued four chart-topping full-lengths, sold millions of albums, been nominated for Grammys, and watched his song “Circles” become an international phenomenon and frequent cover version favorite. (Just ask Sheryl Crow, Jake Bugg, and Of Monsters and Men.) Yes, the man born Austin Richard Post is officially a thing, and in 2019, over 400,000 people bought tickets to his major first tour of US arenas, a tour that forms the backbone of Runaway. Malone performs on a stage that is more like a runway, and he’s almost exclusively a one man show, singing to tracks that burst from enormous monitors flanked by pyrotechnics. The assembled thousands lose their minds to songs like “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” “Congratulations, and “Sunflower,” and Malone sucks on a cigarette during “Circles.” He’s joined onstage by 21 Savage for a performance of “Rockstar,” and also seems to incorporate a few of Justin Bieber’s nimble dance moves for “Better Now,” which itself sounds like a mash-up of Bieber and Drake.

Much has been made of hybridism as it relates to Post Malone’s music, and much is made of that here, too. “He doesn’t have a genre,” insists musician and songwriter Andrew Watt in Runaway. “He doesn’t need a genre. He shattered that concept.” Malone certainly isn’t the first artist to be informed equally by hip-hop, rock ‘n’ roll, and R&B. But what seems to resonate most with his collaborators is how fertile that makes him creatively. And to that end, one of the most interesting elements of the off-stage stuff here is when Malone and his musician and songwriter buddies hole up in one of the Runaway Tour’s buses that’s been fitted out as a mobile recording studio. Malone says he loves the access, to “make some different shit in the vibe of tour,” and he’s captured bellowing lyrics in an isolation booth.

As the jaunt winds toward two sold-out dates at Madison Square Garden, the grind starts to get to Malone, who gets hammered on Bud Lights at a VIP aftershow, repeatedly snaps at the cameras, calls out party fouls on the beer pong court, and complains about fans recording him in public. Welcome to superstardom, pal. When you’re officially a thing, people are gonna crowd you, and you can’t run away.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Bieber, The Weeknd, and JuiceWRLD all have worked with Post Malone in the past, and each of those artists have their own movies, too, with Bieber’s Our World, The Weeknd’s Dawn FM Experience, and JuiceWRLD: Into the Abyss, the latter becoming a much sadder document of the rapper’s untimely demise.

Performance Worth Watching: Back in 2020, in the midst of COVID lockdowns, Post Malone did a livestream concert of scrappy, brawny Nirvana covers to raise money for the W.H.O. Joining him from various corners of his cavernous Utah mansion were drummer Travis Barker, guitarist Nick Mack, and on bass, Brian Lee. Lee resurfaces in Runaway, playing drums for an impromptu but decidedly rocking jam session with Malone banging away on an electric guitar.

Memorable Dialogue: Who is Post Malone while they’re doing nearly 40 dates on the road? “The Runaway Tour is almost indicative of that line where it’s kinda like he’s a runaway train,” says his longtime collaborator, producer and songwriter Louis Bell. “There’s no stopping him. No one has control over him but him.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Cheryl Paglierani, Post Malone’s agent, isn’t going to let you push him around. “We can’t deny him anymore,” she says in Runaway. “He’s real.” Is he, though? Because in this superficial film, Malone is mostly shown to be real good at beer pong, real amped to punctuate his auto-tuned vocal tracks with shouts on stage, real enamored of smoking cigarettes, and real excited to receive another face tattoo. But the chance is never taken to probe any of this for any real depth. “It’s rough sometimes, mentally,” Malone says at one point in a disembodied voice over. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not a real person.” And while there’s something to that, the sense of his superstar status and performative self ricocheting off an inner circle of handlers, collaborators, and hangers-on, Runaway lets the statement drift until it’s consumed by another over-pixelated wash of onstage footage and random backstage moments full of the usual beery hubbub and famous faces making the scene. G-Eazy says Malone represents the “de-categorization” of music, Alicia Keys calls him “eclectic,” and Timbaland and Billie Joe Armstrong appear briefly, too. (Armstrong even plays a round of beer pong.) But all of this is just circling around Post Malone. It’s all positive noise, hyperbole in testimonial form, but often doesn’t feel real at all.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only if you’re a Post Malone completist. In its hour-ish runtime Runaway scrambles bits and pieces of performance footage with a backstage hangout vibe that only drifts on the periphery of Malone’s superstardom.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges