There are biopics—and then, there are musician biopics. Based on the sheer amount of biographical films about real artists, it's basically a subgenre; we just can't get enough of seeing our favorite actors transform into our favorite artists and learning the stories behind the music. (Seriously, in the past year alone, we've gotten biopics on Bob Marley and Amy Winehouse, with the Timothée Chalamet-led Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown still to come, and the Michael Jackson film Michael is due out next year.)
Not all are great—see the satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story for how cliched they can be—but many have led to some of the most transformative performances. The best musician biopics not only celebrate rock, pop, hip-hop, and R&B legends' work but reveal what led to their rise, insight into their interior world, and, at times, their inevitable fall.
