Opening and closing with Queen’s triumphant performance at Live Aid in 1985, the film shows (sort of) the transformation of shy buck-toothed Farrokh Bulsara, the closeted son of Parsis parents, into the strutting swaggering Freddie Mercury. Freddie is shown approaching a band he likes backstage at a club in London. They just lost their lead singer, and Mercury has written a song he wants to show them. Next thing you know, he makes his debut with them, and, except for one catcall of “Paki,” Freddie and his flamboyant movements goes over really well. Next thing you know, they’re Queen, and they’re touring the world.

Rami Malek, whose imitation of Mercury goes beyond the famously prominent teeth taps into Mercury’s ferocious energy, particularly in the concert sequences, all of which give you the electric sense of what it might have been like to be there in person. “Bohemian Rhapsody” isn’t a comprehensive bio-pic, nor a full-spectrum consideration of Mercury’s life—it is a clearly and carefully oriented vision of his career. It’s mostly interested in his private life in relation to a single big idea: success and its price.

A protruding mouth isn’t the only trait for which Freddie endures insults. Born Farrokh Bulsara, he’s an ethnic Parsi, a descendant of the Zoroastrians who fled Persia for India more than a millennium ago; in Great Britain, he’s frequently insulted as a “Paki.” (At his airport job, he meekly replies that he’s not from Pakistan.) He’s also a bisexual man in a country that had only recently decriminalized homosexuality, at a time when it was widely considered shameful, or at least indecent. And he’s from a poor family whose struggles he relates to discrimination. In one of the movie’s exemplary scenes, Freddie is at home with his parents, planning an escape into music (and declaring that his name is no longer his given one of Farrokh but, rather, Freddie); his father instead preaches to him a credo, exhorting him to pursue “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Freddie’s retort isn’t a variation on “boring”—it’s, “And how has that worked out for you?” His father’s virtuous modesty hasn’t brought success in the face of prejudice; Freddie’s bold self-assertion is meant to do so.

When the band’s music begins to crystallize, Freddie masterminds its path to success. He decides that the band should sell its van to finance the recording of an album, and, in the studio, he orchestrates its production as well as the unusual studio techniques with which they create it. He gives the band the new name of Queen; he arranges the crucial meeting, with Elton John’s manager (Aidan Gillen), that will put the band on the map; and, at that meeting, he sells the manager on the band’s future hit-making successes. The scene offers Freddie one of the script’s great arias, on the subject of his ambitions, as he tells the businessman that he’s playing “for the outcasts in the back” because those are the people with whom he himself identifies.

The strength of the movie is in the positioning of Mercury as an artist who confronts opposition throughout society—including from the very institutions that he needs in order to succeed. The script offers Freddie another great aria to deliver, to a record-company executive (played by Mike Myers), in which he declares his ambition to make music with the power of opera, “the wit of Shakespeare, the unbridled joy of musical theatre,” intending to offer “something for everyone.” “We’ll speak in tongues if we want to,” he says. The song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which the record company hesitated to record and then wouldn’t issue as a single, of course became a hit, at which point the movie offers a remarkable montage featuring quotes from reviews of the song, all negative. The very source of Freddie’s popularity—his keen insight into the humiliations and the frustrations of listeners, their strivings and their dreams, their search for love and visions of stifled grandeur—made him rich, famous, and artistically fulfilled, but critically derided.

For that matter, it’s only in those moments of performance, of communion with people who, each in their own way, share his sense of oppression and humiliation, that Freddie feels himself to be truly himself. His joy in performance is a joy in solidarity, and his life offstage can hardly match it. (He speaks of his partying life as a quest for distraction from the “in-between moments” when “the darkness comes back in” and, later, explains his drug use: “Being human is a condition that requires a little anesthesia.”) Yet for his success he’s not just beloved—he’s also subjected to the aggressive prying of gossip-mongers and paparazzi, the brickbats of critics, and the betrayal of intimates. And then he discovers that he’s sick; he’s diagnosed with aids; he realizes that he’s dying.

The film’s reluctance to deal with Mercury’s sexuality is a pity because his sexuality is so connected to the art of Queen that the two cannot be separated out. Refusing to acknowledge queerness as an artistic force—indeed, to point at it and suggest that this is where Mercury went astray—is a deep disservice to Mercury, to Queen, to Queen fans, and to potential Queen fans. Genius doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. Mercury was made up of all of the tensions and passions in his life: he loved Elvis, opera, music hall, costumes, Victorian England … and, yes, sex. Lots of it. Sexual expression equals liberation, and you can feel the exhilaration of that in Mercury’s once-in-a-generation voice. You cannot discuss Freddie Mercury without discussing the queer sensibility driving him, the queer context in which he operated.