Forget Michael and Bohemian Rhapsody, here are six musical biopics that are actually worth watching

In recent years, there have been a glut of biopics of music legends and most of them have been awful. But the good ones exist.

Wenlei Ma

The Nightly

4 Min Read

1 hour ago

Updated

1 hour ago

Definitive Dylan: Cate Blanchett portrays the mid-60s renegade who betrayed his folkie roots in I'm Not There. Credit: Mark Naglazas/Supplied

It would be too easy to look at the increasingly soulless state of the musical biopic and point the finger at Bohemian Rhapsody, even though that Baby Boomer fever dream deserves a lot of the blame.

The Queen movie’s $US900 million global box office was too seductive to ignore for an entertainment industrial complex that has always attempted to replicate the commercial success of a shining example.

It’s not just that Bohemian Rhapsody sold a lot of movie tickets. The nostalgia triggered by the film had a flow-on effect to music sales and concert attendance. Those who loved it – and despite the critical reception, it certainly had its fans – wanted to keep those treasured memories of Queen alive, and they were willing to pay to do it.

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For estates and surviving bandmates and producers of dead icons, the prospect of turning on that tap was too strong. There was so much money to be made, and so the brief became as thus: make it about the music, make it a glorified concert film.

Apparently that’s what the people wanted.

What a nostalgic audience didn’t want was to wallow in the complexities of a human, if that portrait didn’t match up with an easily digestible version in which an artist’s flaws weren’t too confronting.

Note that in the marketing materials for most of these films use a variation of the word “celebration” to outline its raison d’etre. It’s pure pandering – a celebration of the music, a celebration of the artist, but not the fullness of them as a human.

The Michael Jackson biopic spoonfed his fans exactly that. Nothing too thorny, certainly not the paedophilia accusations, and any eccentricities would be blamed on his father’s emotional abuse.

Conversely, Back to Black, the 2024 Amy Winehouse biopic, exonerates her father who had come off not too well in the 2015 documentary, Amy. Not surprisingly, he was involved with the former.

Which is not to say that every musical biopic since Bohemian Rhapsody has been an artistic blackhole.

Rocketman, the Elton John movie from 2019, made some authentic choices, the Robbie Williams one tried something different with a CGI monkey, the Bob Dylan one featured a great performance from Timothee Chalamet, while the Bruce Springsteen one tried to have an honest conversation about depression.

The latter didn’t do very well at the box office, which lends credence to the furphy that music biopics have to be toe-tapping crowd-pleasers to the exclusion of anything that might get audiences down.

It wasn’t always this way. Before Bohemian Rhapsody changed the matrix of the genre, a lot of these films were multi-layered works of art that could do more than one thing.

They could be a showcase for the music, they could be a social drama about the historical context that gave birth to individual talent and a cultural movement, and they could also be a complex character study of an artist and their creative process, as well as the many personal demons that would come to plague so many.

Don’t settle for what has devolved into a visual album with some filler scenes in between musical set-pieces, demand that filmmakers who take on the challenge of immortalising icons make a real movie.

Here are some musical biopics that are actually worth your time.

AMADEUS

An intense and luxurious film about the dramatised rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, Milos Forman’s movie is more about how jealousy and bitterness can consume a person.