It’s easy to judge a music biopic without seeing it first.
Look at what happened when StudioCanal UK released a clip from the Amy Winehouse drama “Back to Black” on social media. The response was brutal. “This is actually insane,” one X user wrote about footage of star Marisa Abela singing Winehouse’s early track “Stronger Than Me,” in a montage that demonstrates the troubled singer’s rise to fame. That one post set off a wave of judgment that included comments such as, “This isn’t Amy Winehouse, it’s Amanda Whiteclaw.”
The same thing is happening with early photos of Timothée Chalamet in folk-rocker drag prowling the set of James Mangold’s upcoming Bob Dylan film. Does the internet boyfriend actually look like ’60s Dylan? Or is he too modern and baby-faced? That’s up for debate, and debate is raging. I would bet as soon as there are images of Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen — which, yes, is probably happening — there will be plenty of opinions, as well.
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End of carouselPeople care deeply about music biopics because people care deeply about music and the stars that make it. Fandom of a musical artist is intimate in a way few other art forms are. If you’ve lived with someone like Amy Winehouse or Bob Dylan in your ears for decades — or in Dylan’s case, more than half a century — you want to make sure the people portraying them are doing them justice. This is a genre where “getting it wrong” doesn’t simply feel like a missed opportunity — it feels personal.
Of course, that same sense of connection fuels demand. “It seems that audiences do like a good musical biopic, especially for an artist they love,” Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian said.
But what makes a music biopic good? In the case of rock and pop stars, it’s so easy to view clips of the real thing that a film has to give you something beyond what you can find on YouTube. Fred Goodman, who wrote the book “Rock on Film: The Movies That Rocked the Big Screen,” says that it’s capturing the spirit of the subject. “You have to put that first and foremost,” Goodman said.
Often it depends on a transformative performance — an actor who digs deeper than mere impression and inhabits the essence of the musician in some fundamental way. Most recently, Austin Butler delivered such a performance in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” (2022), establishing himself as an actor to be reckoned with as he captured the pure lust Elvis Presley projected. (Luhrmann’s excessive style might be too gaudy for some, but you can’t deny that “Elvis,” with all of its kaleidoscopic visuals, brings the sequined fervor of Presley to life.) Other actors who have entered the canon over the years include Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980), Angela Bassett as Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It” (1993) and Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in “Ray” (2004).
Performances like this are difficult to pull off. Perhaps it’s telling that a biopic frequently cited for excellence is Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” (2007), which is about Dylan but uses six actors of different ages, genders and races — Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw — to play invented characters representing different versions of the singer-songwriter. “That’s not a straight biography but captures a real essence of that artist, and it’s a tremendous cinematic work,” Goodman said.
Still, sometimes it doesn’t really matter if a biopic is actually “good” — in the sense that it is lauded by the critical establishment. The most popular often get the most scathing reviews. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the critically maligned 2018 Queen biopic that nonetheless won an Oscar for Rami Malek, grossed over $903 million at the box office. This year’s “Bob Marley: One Love” ended up defying middling reviews and expectations, grossing over $177 million worldwide.
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It should be noted that rock biopics can be beneficial both for movie studios and record labels. If the members of a band are alive and touring — such as Queen, for instance — a biopic can boost ticket sales. Even if the artist is no longer around, movies can draw listeners to an artist’s back catalogue. “It’s become something that’s part of a larger music industry ecology to find a way to promote an artist, when albums don’t really do it anymore,” Goodman said. “I think that’s part of the reason for their ubiquity.” Perhaps we’ll reach the pinnacle of this in 2027 when Sam Mendes directs movies about each of the four Beatles.
At their worst, these films are ripe for parody, as evidenced by the mockery found in sendups such as “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” — which directly references “Walk the Line” starring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash — and “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” which imagined the goofy and mild mannered Weird Al was actually a hard-partying rock star. (The 2022 film took the spoof to extremes when Al, played by Daniel Radcliffe, faced off against Pablo Escobar and Madonna.)
Not surprisingly, both critics and audiences reject biopics that are perceived as taking advantage of the musicians to whom they purport to pay homage. There was early backlash to “Selena,” which was released in 1997, just two years after her murder, in part because star Jennifer Lopez was Puerto Rican rather than Mexican and in part because it was just so soon. The movie has since been embraced. It’s hard to imagine that will be the case with “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” which landed in theaters with a thud at the end of 2022, grossing only around $59 million worldwide. Coming a mere 10 years after Houston’s death, there was a whiff of “too soon” that permeated the release as well as a sense that the filmmakers were attempting to brush over some of the darker elements of her life.
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There’s a similar issue with “Back to Black,” directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. Winehouse’s life was short and marked by addiction. She died at age 27 in 2011. When she was alive, the public watched as the tabloids hounded her. Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary “Amy” is a damning account of how both the media and those close to Winehouse contributed to her downfall. So how do you dramatize her story without further exploiting Winehouse? Taylor-Johnson’s answer is to smooth it over. Made with the participation of Winehouse’s estate, the film reframes her story as one that’s sad but inspirational — and in doing so, lets those who did wrong her off the hook.
Abela’s performance gives Winehouse a certain sweetness but misses some of her fire. The Winehouse on screen can’t hold a candle to the Winehouse of memory — messiness and all. It feels like an “uncanny valley” simulacrum of the artist, a cheap imitation. And that’s the worst thing for a biopic to be.
correction
An earlier version of this story stated that Focus Features posted a clip of the movie "Back to Black" on social media. In fact, the clip was posted by StudioCanal UK. The story has been updated.
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