At the movies, superhero movies have cooled off and music biopics are flooding the marketplace like a new version of The Avengers.
Most recently, news came that a Britney Spears biopic is in the works. That followed the debut of the first trailer for A Complete Unknown — starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan — which will hit theatres before the year is up. And 2024 has already seen big-screen biopics of Bob Marley (Bob Marley: One Love), Amy Winehouse (Back to Black) and, er, Kneecap (the relatively unknown Irish hip-hop group).
And we’re not even to the chorus yet. In various states of production are biopics on Michael Jackson (Michael is due out next year), The Beatles (four films, one for each member, are due in 2027), Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Linda Ronstadt, the Bee Gees, Carole King, Boy George, Keith Moon, Billy Joel and Dionne Warwick.
What’s going on? (That’s a question, not a reference to the Dr Dre-produced Marvin Gaye biopic, which is in a state of turnaround.) The short answer is Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Queen biopic, which won four Oscars, grossed nearly $US1 billion, reinvigorated Queen’s catalog and kicked down the door on the music biopic genre.
Never mind that it wasn’t very good, or that it conveniently fudged portions of the group’s history. It was the catalyst for our current wave of pop star-centric cinema.
Music biopics are nothing new: Jimmy Stewart played Glenn Miller in 1954’s The Glenn Miller Story, and Diana Ross was nominated for an Oscar for playing Billie Holiday in 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues. A few years later, Gary Busey was nominated for an Oscar for his lead role in 1978’s The Buddy Holly Story, and Sissy Spacek won Best Actress for playing Loretta Lynn in 1980’s Coal Miner’s Daughter.
Big screen music bios continued through the ’80s (La Bamba, Great Balls of Fire!), ’90s (The Doors, Selena) and ’00s (Ray, Walk the Line). As the genre grew, the conventions of the storytelling — humble beginnings, meteoric rise to the top, hard fall, redemption in the end — became obvious enough to parody, and 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story skewered the predictable formula. But that didn’t stop them from coming, because there’s too much upside.
In a world where it’s hard to sell the public on new characters or original ideas, musicians and pop stars are pre-sold entities that come with built-in audiences. The performances themselves are often awards bait. Biopics can help relaunch or reinvigorate a career, which can lead to increased album and concert ticket sales, and the rise-to-glory rock star story arc lends itself well to Hollywood’s three-act story structure.
And the movies are often made with the co-operation of the musicians themselves, which helps soften those sometimes rough edges of their lives. If a film-maker wants to colour outside the lines and make a movie without the artist’s sign-off, music rights can be held back, and nobody wants to see a Britney movie where we can’t hear Baby One More Time.
Now the biopic has become a feather in the cap of a musician or artist; you’re not a big deal until your story has been played out on screen. But the multiplex is starting to seem like a jukebox, and the gap between the good ones (Rocketman, Love & Mercy) and the bad ones (let’s start with Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody) is widening.
The best examples of the genre have a clear perspective and tend to focus on one specific period in an artist’s life; the full cradle-to-the-grave story is tough to effectively cram into two hours. (Plus there needs to be time to play all those hits.) The Springsteen biopic, for example, is slated to centre on the making of the Boss’ 1982 album Nebraska, which is a more effective approach than trying to get 50 years of a career on screen.
Springsteen is tough because we know so much about him, and that was one of the problems with this year’s Back to Black; Marisa Abela was able to mimic a lot of Amy Winehouse’s distinct mannerisms but couldn’t capture her grit or soul.
Also, we don’t yet have enough distance from Winehouse; she died in 2011, and 2015’s Oscar-winning documentary Amy did an excellent job of telling her story. Back to Black came off like an attempt at image rehabilitation on behalf of Winehouse’s father and her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.
Spears’ story and others could face a similar fate, but truth isn’t the goal in these projects. It’s commerce, the artist as intellectual property, and the biopic is just another piece of their portfolio. At least the soundtracks are already taken care of.
It’s hard to say how long this wave will last; cinematic trends ebb and flow, and music biopics will eventually cool off. Right now they’re hotter than a new star, but we’ve all seen enough movies to know a crash is coming — and that someone will be there to write a song about it. — TCA
