The Good, the Bad and the Embalmed: Talking Music Biopics on the Radio This Morning
I got asked on the radio this morning about the best music biopics ever made, which is one of those deceptively simple questions that quickly turns into an argument about what these movies are even supposed to do.
Because most music biopics are not really about music. They’re about branding, grief management and awards-season acting reels. They uncomplicated strange people into inspirational content. The rough edges get sanded. Lessons are absorbed. The difficult genius becomes “relatable.” Drugs arrive on schedule around the second act. The reconciliation happens near the encore.
The genre has a default shape now:
difficult childhood
early talent
first hit
addiction/ego/conflict
redemption concert
end credits over archival footage
You can practically hear the swelling piano under the dialogue.
And yet every so often somebody escapes the formula and makes something genuinely alive — a movie that understands musicians are often irrational creatures driven by appetite, insecurity, vanity, transcendence and occasionally genius.
So here, more or less, was my list.
Bob Dylan Approximately: Cate Blancett in I’m Not There
I’m Not There
Maybe the smartest music biopic ever made because it understands that Bob Dylan is not a stable identity. He’s a series of performances, evasions, appropriations and reinventions.
Todd Haynes wisely refuses the trap of literalism. Instead of one actor “becoming” Dylan, he fractures him into multiple selves — Cate Blanchett’s amphetamine-thin electric Dylan, Christian Bale’s born-again version, Richard Gere’s ghost-western outlaw, Ben Whishaw’s Rimbaud-like interrogation subject.
The structure isn’t gimmickry. It’s criticism.
The movie understands something essential about Dylan: that from very early on, “Bob Dylan” itself became partly a performance piece. Blanchett’s performance remains astonishing not because she imitates Dylan but because she captures his velocity — the speed of thought, the defensive humor, the exhaustion with being interpreted.
The film changed the genre. After “I’m Not There,” you could feel filmmakers realizing music biopics did not have to be cradle-to-grave Wikipedia entries.
Love & Mercy
The anti-“Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Most music biopics simplify artists into digestible arcs. “Love & Mercy” does the opposite. It treats Brian Wilson’s creativity as both ecstatic and fragile.
Paul Dano’s scenes during the “Pet Sounds” sessions may be the best studio-recording sequences ever filmed. You can practically see Wilson hearing arrangements assemble themselves in real time. The movie understands that pop music can be architecture — harmony stacked atop harmony until emotion becomes physical.
And splitting Wilson between Paul Dano and John Cusack turns out to be structurally brilliant. One Brian is creating impossible beauty; the other is trapped inside the wreckage of having created it.
The movie also understands something many films avoid: genius does not necessarily arrive in a psychologically sustainable form.
Walk the Line
Still probably the best conventional Hollywood music biopic.
Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon don’t merely impersonate Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. They understand that touring musicians are workers as much as stars. Mangold gets the buses, cigarettes, motel rooms and exhaustion right.
The chemistry matters because Johnny and June were fundamentally a duet act emotionally. One steadied the other. One challenged the other.
What makes the film work is that it remembers Southern musical culture as lived experience rather than folklore. Nobody is preserved behind glass. The songs emerge from labor, hunger, loneliness and impulse.
Mangold also does something surprisingly rare in modern music movies: he lets songs play. He trusts performance.
24 Hour Party People
One of the funniest music movies ever made and one of the wisest.
Steve Coogan’s Tony Wilson keeps breaking the fourth wall because the movie understands pop history itself is partly self-mythology. Memory is unreliable. Scene-making is performance art.
The film is nominally about Factory Records, Joy Division, New Order and the Hacienda, but really it’s about Manchester inventing itself through music. Punk mutates into post-punk. Post-punk mutates into rave culture. Everybody seems simultaneously visionary and ridiculous.
The movie understands something essential about great music scenes: they’re usually held together by hustlers, obsessives, eccentrics and people with catastrophically poor business judgment.
Without dreamers, half these scenes never happen.
Without accountants, half of them survive.
Inside Llewyn Davis
Not technically a biopic, but emotionally truer than most actual biopics.
The Coen brothers understand the Greenwich Village folk scene just before Dylan detonated the culture. Oscar Isaac’s Llewyn Davis— apparently based on Dave Van Ronk— is talented, intelligent, proud and doomed by timing, temperament and maybe history itself.
What makes the movie so haunting is that it acknowledges a truth music culture rarely likes discussing: most gifted musicians do not become legends. Many simply orbit greatness briefly before disappearing into ordinary life.
The movie is about artistic drift — the sense of circling the same block while the world quietly moves on without you.
And because it’s the Coens, it’s also very funny in a bleak, deadpan way. Failure keeps arriving in tiny installments.
The Ones That Don’t Work
Which brings us to the bad ones.
Not all bad music biopics are incompetent. Some are handsomely made and perfectly watchable. The problem is that they embalm their subjects.
The prime example is probably Bohemian Rhapsody, which made enormous amounts of money while turning Freddie Mercury into a motivational poster. Rami Malek works hard, but the movie feels corporate-approved down to the molecular level. Freddie’s danger — his volatility, erotic energy and unpredictability — gets tidied into uplift.
Likewise Respect, where Jennifer Hudson can obviously sing Aretha Franklin, but the movie struggles to capture Franklin’s actual musical intelligence — her arranging brilliance, her interpretive daring, the way she reshaped songs from the piano outward.
Back to Black has moments, largely because Marisa Abela commits fully, but Amy Winehouse starts feeling less like a person than a tragic inevitability marching toward tabloid destiny.
And then there are the films defeated by rights issues. Jimi: All Is by My Side attempts a Hendrix portrait without really being able to use Hendrix’s music. Stardust tries to make a David Bowie movie without Bowie songs. This is a little like filming a tiger while refusing to show stripes.
Why the Good Ones Last
The best music biopics understand that music itself is unstable. Scenes rise and collapse. Identities shift. Artists reinvent themselves or destroy themselves or vanish before anybody fully understands what they were doing.
The bad films explain too much.
The good ones leave room for mystery.
That may be why I’m Not There lingers longest in my head. Dylan remains unresolved at the end because the movie understands resolution itself might be false. Some artists are too restless to fit inside narrative closure.
And honestly, that’s probably healthy.
The minute a musician becomes fully explainable, something important has likely been lost.
Backbeat was a pretty good biopic, not of John, Paul or George, but, rather, Stu Sutcliffe.