against music biopics
why make up scarcely believable histories of your favourite pop stars to show at cinemas when far more interesting actual histories exist?
considering the facts of Amy Winehouse’s life, you’d think an autobiographical film on the subject would need no additional mythologising. according to Laura Snapes (Guardian, 12 apr), a recent biopic on her directed on her life ruins the memory by doing just that.
to quote Snapes, that the biopic implies Winehouse’s desire to have a child was the key reason for her suffering ‘[i]s a gendered simplification that exonerates the forces that killed her’.
so in Back to Black, we have a biopic about a popular singer, showing at cinemas across the country, which needlessly sidesteps the facts of their life. this would make for an irresponsible contribution to the collective memory of an entertainer; anyone can easily mistake lore for canon.
which may be why cultural critics often compare the stylised ‘fictions’ of biopics with the carefully curated ‘facts’ of documentary form. Snapes is adamant that ‘anyone who saw Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy is well aware of the injustices faced by Amy Winehouse during her 27 years of life’. Danielle Solzman is sure that watching Kevin Macdonald’s 2012 Bob Marley documentary would be a better use of her time (even though she hasn’t seen it) than watching the One Love biopic, before going on to admit that the best footage in the entire film is ‘the real-life footage at the end’. even music biopics yet to be released suffer the same close comparison with documentary portraits of the same artists: the director of Leaving Neverland is concerned that a forthcoming feature that promises to address all aspects of Michael Jackson’s life will instead simply ‘glorify a man who abused children’, according to what he discovered from his documentary. it seems safe to assume that whenever you want to watch a biopic, you ought to watch a corresponding documentary on that celebrity first, for balance.
perhaps if that were the case, perhaps pop music documentaries would become as lucrative as biopics are nowadays. the One Love biopic has already grossed £100-odd million despite Solzman’s reservations, becoming one of the top five highest grossing music biopics of all time. in fact, the top eight grossing pop star biopics are all 21st century releases, proving the financial case for them beyond all doubt.
meanwhile, many pop music documentaries get relatively limited screenings at uk cinemas. i nearly missed documentaries on 50 years of King Crimson and the life and times of Little Richard that briefly aired in a few arthouse places last year, and oftentimes i have to watch new documentaries of musicians on straight-to-streaming platforms.
so why do people go to watch them? as far as i can tell from friends of mine, likeness is a pull factor, which is connected to the strength of the imitating actor’s impressions. but this reasoning is all a bit Stars in Their Eyes to me. besides, aren’t audiences dissatisfied with dramatised portrayals of their favourite artists’ lives when verified tales already exist out in the wild, sometimes supported by video evidence?
i sensed biopics were not my jam when the actor Don Cheadle wrote, directed and starred in one about Miles Davis in 2015. i watched the trailer and all the available clips i could find, and read the synopsis, and while Cheadle puts so much care and thought into his impression of the trumpeter, i feared that the film would struggle under the weight of having to settle on a single narrative to make any sense to a wider audience than the niche cohort of Davis diehards interested in such a film. and that’s how it plays out. in the end, Cheadle’s Miles Davis ends up on an escapade with a journalist (played by Ewan McGregor) to recover some stolen tapes of his recordings.
besides, the truth is stranger than anything a filmmaker could dream up. take this clip from an interview with the man himself in the 1980s (below, from 6 minutes 50 seconds). i think Miles Davis casually swatting aside the question of being a pimp is infinitely more intriguing than the trumpeting gangster dramatisation spun in the biopic. Cheadle might have been better off making a film loosely inspired by the figure of a certain trumpet playing legend of years past.
but actors doing passable impressions of musical artists doing scarcely believable things gets a lot more time on the big screen than a narrative voiceover interspersed with commentary from insiders and acquaintances coupled with real life footage. it’s unfortunate that the documentary depiction of a music icon’s life is often perceived as a televisual affair, compared with the supposedly cinematic air a biopic brings.
or perhaps i’m missing the point. one crucial difference between a documentary and a biopic is that while they both must have a subject and they must tell a story about that subject, only the latter must make a hero of them. and that might be all that people really want. for a story without a hero is a story that ain’t worth knowing, and if the hero is seen to be overcoming allegations of child abuse in a way that avoids insulting his victims, then arguably the issue has indeed been addressed. and this is the kind of bet a major film studio would take on a Michael Jackson biopic, isn’t it?
perhaps the true purpose of biopics is to launder celebrities’ reputations.