When Walk the Line strode into cinemas in 2005, all dressed in black, it gave final shape to a template that Hollywood has been copying ever since. James Mangold’s Oscar-winning Johnny Cash film – following on the heels of Ray, Taylor Hackford’s similarly awards-garlanded take on Ray Charles a year earlier – established the music biopic blueprint so definitively that the form immediately ossified into cliché. Troubled childhood, early brilliance, meteoric ascent, drugs and adversity, redemptive finale. By the time Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story came along to skewer the whole charade in 2007, the parody practically wrote itself.
Fast-forward 20 years, past the vapidly formulaic Bohemian Rhapsody, and we’re still being served the same meal with different garnishes. A Complete Unknown and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere – biopics of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen respectively – both arrived a year apart; Sam Mendes’s Beatles quartet is slated for 2028. We’re at saturation point. So the news about Cameron Crowe’s Joni Mitchell biopic ought to inspire a chorus of groans. Except for one thing: they’ve only managed to rope in “21-time Oscar nominee and three-time winner” Meryl Streep!
