Music biopics are always in vogue, with Hollywood never missing a beat when it comes to pumping out a new one. This year, one icon in Bob Marley has already had the biopic treatment, and another is on the way about Amy Winehouse.
But, it’s a slippery slope and bringing a musical legend to life on the big screen is no easy task. Fail and it awakes the wrath of critics and devoted fans. Here we sort the high notes from the double flats...
One Life (2024)
The film tanked with critics, receiving two stars from the Standard where it was described as being laden with “music movie clichés.” Other reviewers described it as “particularly uninspired” and “patchy.”But, Kingsley Ben-Adir’s performance seems to have done some justice to the legend as the film dominated the box office for several weeks.
Control (2007)
The, sadly brief, life story of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis – married at 19, a father and voice of the classic debut album Unknown Pleasures at 22, dead at 23 – is told in exquisitely shot black-and-white by photographer and video director Anton Corbijn. Even the terraces of Macclesfield have a bleak beauty as the backdrop to Sam Riley’s portrayal of the withdrawn frontman, who wrestles with depression and epilepsy and is torn between his childhood sweetheart and a glamorous Belgian journalist. The music scenes stick long in the memory with Riley nailing Curtis’s transfixing, manic performing style.
Walk the Line (2005)
The story of Johnny Cash avoids the Man in Black’s patchier later career to follow a more traditional biopic trajectory: tragic childhood with a furious father, followed by sudden musical success which is tarnished by drug misuse and a stormy love life. Joaquin Phoenix does a fine job of replicating Cash’s cavernous baritone and intense manner, while Reese Witherspoon’s spirited performance as June Carter – later June Carter Cash –won her an Oscar. Among the best musical biopics out there.
I’m Not There (2007)
Bob Dylan’s cultural legacy is so great that in hindsight maybe it’s obvious that a film would require six different actors to portray different facets of his character. They include Heath Ledger as an actor with marriage troubles, Richard Gere as Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid, Marcus Carl Franklin as a black, train-hopping 11-year-old, and Cate Blanchett as the wild-haired folk musician going electric. Director Todd Haynes, whose work included telling the Karen Carpenter story using Barbie dolls, leads Dylanologists down a fascinating, meandering path.
The Runaways (2010)
The brief career of The Runaways might not have been commercially successful enough to merit a biopic, but as an all-female rock band in the mid-Seventies they were pioneers. Dakota Fanning plays lead singer Cherie Currie, on whose memoir the film is based, with Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett. Michael Shannon is predictably good value too, this time playing their creepy svengali Kim Fowley. The inevitable drugs and egos meant their time together was over too quickly, and the film doesn’t outstay its welcome either.
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Michael Winterbottom’s eccentric, fourth-wall-breaking film goes for the legend over the truth, and features Joy Division in a very different setting from the subsequent Control. This one spreads its net far wider to cover the fertile period of the Manchester music scene that also brought us New Order, Happy Mondays and the Hacienda nightclub. Steve Coogan is the man in the middle as TV presenter and Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson, an eccentric who looks like the sensible one among some of rock’s wilder characters.
England is Mine (2017)
Can a music biopic ever work without the music itself? The answer, as presented by this unauthorised Morrissey biopic, is almost. Director Mark Gill tries to make do with a lack of Smiths’ hits by swerving much of the band’s history, instead focusing on Mozza’s downtrodden adolescence. Jack Lowden delivers a suitably sullen turn as the would-be frontman, but the film’s dourness was crying out for just a sprinkling of Morrissey-Marr magic. Alas, it never came.
Nina (2016)
Not having the rights to the music is one thing, but having the family of the dead subject in fierce opposition, and the film’s own own star actor later denouncing the project, is another thing entirely. This catastrophic Nina Simone biopic was a cliché-ridden mess, with the lead role taken by Zoe Saldana, an Afro-Latina woman, who wore skin-darkening make-up and facial prosthetics in a bid to better resemble the late singer. The move drew outrage; Saldana later said she should “never have played” the vocalist, while Simone’s estate called the whole thing “gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, nauseating [and] soul-crushing”.
Jersey Boys (2014)
Getting rights, and input from some of real-life subjects is still no guarantee the end product will be any good. This Frankie Valli-backed adaptation of the eponymous hit musical seemed like a nailed-on success, but ended up rather out of tune. Despite the direction of Clint Eastwood and all that chart-topping source material to work with, the songs somehow lacked the same energy as they did on Broadway. It wasn’t a disaster, but it was undeniably diluted by its tiresome, Goodfellas-lite backstory segments.
CBGB (2013)
Venues don’t come much more mythologised than CBGB, the New York hangout that hosted some of the finest American punk rock and new wave bands, from the Ramones to Patti Smith. The story of the club and its maverick owner, Hilly Kristal, is ripe for an intriguing biopic, then? Correct, but this film ain’t it. It’s a caricatured disaster, funny for all the wrong reasons, and a criminal underuse of the source material. Still, there is the amusing subplot that, with both Alan Rickman and Rupert Grint in the cast, it all feels somewhat like a weird dream Harry Potter might have had after a night on the butterbeer.
The Beach Boys: An American Family (2000)
This TV miniseries aims to chart the early history of the Beach Boys, but its depictions of psychedelic culture are about as stereotyped as they come. Although it delves into the drug-addled misadventures of Brian Wilson – a darkly intriguing journey in the right hands – the whole thing just ends up feeling cartoonishly overblown. Wilson himself was less than impressed (“I thought it stunk!” he said). Add in the copyright-dodging sound-alikes on the soundtrack and the result is a very bad vibration. Much better is the Paul Dano-featuring Love and Mercy (2014), which does Wilson a far greater service.
