There’s a new biopic doing the rounds called Michael, a highly original title for a movie about Michael Jackson. From what I can gather, it’s a sanitised version of Jackson’s life with the story ending in 1988 before all the sordid allegations were revealed, but that hasn’t affected the box office takings may exceed $1 billion dollars, eclipsing the $900 million made by the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Everyone, it seems, loves a music biopic except, inevitably, me.
As well as the Queen movie, there have been biopics about Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Johnny Cash, Bob Marley and Amy Winehouse, among others. My problem is very simple: I am familiar with the artists but the first thing I think when I see a clip or a trailer I see not the artist but an actor playing the artist.
Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury is apparently excellent, but all I can see is Rami Malek with a moustache. The bloke who plays Brian May doesn’t look anything like May. But the problem is me. Queen fans – and I am clearly not in that number – are clearly able to set aside their disbelief and imagine that the people you are watching are actually the real people. In terms of music biopics, that’s sadly well beyond my levels of imagination.
In the short to medium term, the British director Sam Mendes is making four new biopics of the individual Beatles. 56 years after their last album, I remain a massive fan and am ravenous when it comes to finding out things I didn’t know about the Fab Four, something I did in spades when reading Ian Leslie’s brilliant book John and Paul. A Love story in songs. I then read Paul McCartney’s book The Lyrics, which is the nearest we will ever get to an autobiography we will get from Macca, and learned even more. I am not sure what I will gain, if anything, from Paul Mescal’s portrayal of him. Not that I will be going to see it, mind.
I wondered whether it might be a bigger problem than just music. My favourite ever movie is All The President’s Men in which Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman played the legendary journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who uncovered the Watergate scandal and I had, and have, no issues with it whatsoever. I think I might know the reason why.
I had never heard of Woodward and Bernstein, so the people who played them became real to me. That they were played by truly great actors helped, of course, but I wonder if I had felt the same if I had been familiar with the journalists before the actors.
And much as I love the actor Michael Sheen, I never watch his movies where he plays Tony Blair, David Frost, Brian Clough and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and think he is anyone other than Michael Sheen. Same with Steve Coogan when he played Jimmy Savile (although he was absolutely incredible). That, in a nutshell, is how I feel about all music biopics.
The Brian Wilson movie Love And Mercy was a decent enough depiction of his life and both Paul Dano and John Cusack who played Wilson at various stages of his life performed admirably. But I just couldn’t see the point of it. I’m a bit of an anorak and I very much doubt I’d have learned anything I didn’t know before. But hang on: maybe I have hit on something.
Maybe Love and Mercy was made in order to entertain and educate the wider public about Wilson’s troubled genius and not just obsessives like me. And there is no doubt that that his story, and that of The Beach Boys, is an astonishing one. And again, maybe people just go along to see a good story and don’t much care who the star is?
When it comes to Michael Jackson, I’m thinking that the whole point of the movie was to entertain and to avoid the awkward stuff and judging from the box office takings most folk are happy with that. I’m just about in the same boat when it comes to Jackson because I still love his music and have largely convinced myself that he may have been a wrong ‘un but nothing has been proved in court against him.
Whatever I think about it, the genre is not going away, with biopics about Joni Mitchell, Ronnie Spector and Janis Joplin in the pipeline. I can happily live without any of these movies, to be honest, and with the exception of some of Ms Mitchell’s back catalogue the music, too. But the movie moneymen know their stuff and doubtless they will all be box office successes.
The fault clearly lies in my imagination, more specifically the lack of it. I’ll always prefer a book to a movie. And that maybe tells its own story.
