Next month, a new musician biopic will arrive in theaters. It’s called Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and it’s about the making of The Boss’ 1982 classic LP Nebraska. Like many Bruce fans, I watched the trailer when it dropped over the summer. And I watched it over and over. And then I made fun of it with my friends. Because, like most musician biopics, it looked a little overwrought and more than a little corny.
But I kept on watching that trailer. Finally, I had to admit something to myself: I like watching these silly little music movies. Apparently, I am also a little overwrought and more than a little corny.
In the Deliver Me From Nowhere trailer, the most controversial element is a monologue delivered by Jeremy Strong (who plays Bruce’s manager Jon Landau) in which he talks about a hole in the floor of Springsteen’s boyhood bedroom. “The floor, it’s supposed to be solid. You’re supposed to be able to stand on it. Bruce, he didn’t have that,” he says. “Bruce is a repairman, and what he’s doing with this album is, he’s repairing that hole in his floor. He’s repairing that hole in himself. And once he’s done that, he’s gonna repair the entire world.”
The prose is purple. The performance is portentous. The metaphor is putrid. The speech encapsulates a lot of what is wrong with musician biopics. It also, God forgive me, gave me chills. I’m sorry! I’m just a man! You put on that Nebraska music and start talking about holes in floors and I get swept away. Is it silly? Of course? Is the silliness, perhaps, the point? Absolutely.
Allow me to explain why I feel like that. And, at the same time, I’ll tell you about my 25 favorite musician biopics.
PRE-LIST ENTERTAINMENT: BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY IS A BAD MOVIE… AND I’VE SEEN IT THREE TIMES
Let’s state the obvious: The musician biopic is a debased cinematic genre. We all know this. I could list all the problems with this kind of movie, but that would be as predictable and self-evident as Ray or Bob Marley: One Love. But just for the sake of the exercise, I’ll name the top four.
1. Actors are inherently less cool than musicians. (The exceptions are Marlon Brando in 1953, Richard Roundtree in 1971, Kurt Russell in 1981, and Paul Newman at all times.) This coolness deficiency makes the average thespian’s attempts to emulate pop and rock stars immediately appear unconvincing and inauthentic.
2. Listening to music is thrilling, but the process of creating music (rehearsing, songwriting, recording, promoting, touring, etc.) is often super boring to a casual observer. Trying to trick the audience into believing otherwise (by, for example, crafting soulful monologues about how holes in floors might save humanity) only ends up inadvertently emphasizing this fact.
3. Related: Music isn’t meant to be discussed or depicted in a literal fashion. That music is nonlinear and abstract and impossible to sum up completely in tangible language is what’s great about it. (This is also the problem with music writing, though you didn’t hear that from me.)
4. The lives of famous musicians typically unfold with unsurprising, formulaic mundanity. Starts playing music early, inspired by either seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show or a kindly Black man who happens to play the blues next door. Perform some poorly attended gigs. Rebel against father, who is a jerk and/or a drunk. Become a millionaire with a drug habit. Eventually, change the world forever.
The specifics might differ but that’s more or less the arc. The clichés of musician biopics are shaped by the clichés of reality. Humanity is largely unoriginal and derivative and deserving of a poor Rotten Tomatoes score.
We all must accept these limitations before we proceed. But let’s also concede a seemingly contradictory thought: A musician biopic can still be fun to watch. Especially if you accept the limitations.
Many (not all, but the majority) of my favorite musician biopics are not exactly “good” in the usual sense. I like the ones that lean into their unavoidable corniness (usually without irony) and do it with love (or, at least, a charming guilelessness). Expecting a musician biopic to not be corny is like attending a Metallica concert and getting mad that they played “Enter Sandman.” Ultimately, your expectations are to blame.
An underrated aspect of why Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is such an effective parody is that the filmmakers clearly studied musician biopics and enjoyed them. Making fun of something you hate only comes off as spiteful and mean-spirited. But mocking what you love means you have intimate familiarity with the target of derision. After all, to truly observe something, you have to like it enough to spend the sufficient amount of time noticing all the stupid little details.
Case in point: Bohemian Rhapsody is not on this list, despite being the highest-grossing musician biopic of all time. I excluded it because it’s a little too terrible, even for me, with a cringy lead performance that stands as one of the more inexplicable Oscar wins of recent times. However, while I don’t think Bohemian Rhapsody is “good,” I do enjoy watching it. I like it because, in spite of everything, I find movies like this to be compulsively watchable, in the same way I used to find Behind The Music episodes to be highly addictive.
Junky recreations of pop-star mythology are comforting to me like tomato soup and saltines on a sick day. Besides, no matter all the mean things I could say about it, Bohemian Rhapsody at heart is just an excuse to listen to Queen in the dark for two hours. And no matter Rami Malek’s preposterous fake teeth, that is an experience which does not suck.
25. Great Balls Of Fire! (1989)
Admittedly, “charming guilelessness” is not a phrase that suits this movie. “Ethical guilelessness” is more appropriate, and “amoral” pretty much nails the bullseye. I probably couldn’t justify putting it on this list if more people had seen it. But trust me when I say that Great Balls Of Fire! is one of the most disreputable and all-around insane musician biopics I’ve ever seen. I enjoy it, but I don’t feel good about it.
Directed by Jim McBride — who six years earlier made the similarly trashy and tasteless Breathless, a remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 New Wave classic enjoyed by Quentin Tarantino, me, and a handful of other degenerates — Great Balls Of Fire! depicts a few years in the life of Jerry Lee Lewis, a master rock ‘n’ roller and certifiable “bad person” accused of far too many crimes to be listed here. Jerry Lee is a fascinating character whose time on Earth, by any standard, must be classified as high tragedy. And yet this cartoonish film, which depicts the main character (played by a bonkers Dennis Quaid) as a bug-eyed Looney Tunes wolf with the broadest southern accent this side of a Dukes Of Hazard episode, treats the material as fodder for a fun-loving comedy-musical.
If this were about any other person, Great Balls Of Fire! would falter as crass sanitization. But Jerry Lee did so many terrible things that sanitizing him is impossible. (Even when you’re trying extra hard to sanitize him!) This is, after all, a movie based on a book co-written by the first cousin (once removed!) who married Jerry when she was only 13. And the source material automatically supersedes any cinematic flourish intended to glorify him.
So: Jerry Lee’s skeeziness is on full display in Great Balls Of Fire!. What McBride doesn’t do is judge his subject. In his hands, Great Balls Of Fire! plays like an epically sleazy exploitation grindhouse picture from 20 years earlier. The most disturbing scene is when Jerry Lee and his child bride (played by Winona Ryder) have sex and Jerry Lee chastises her because “you don’t move like a virgin.” While it’s not played for laughs (like an earlier sequence where the bride’s dad threatens to shoot Jerry Lee) it doesn’t treat Jerry Lee like the child molester he is. Though this extremely casual treatment — I’m giving McBride too much credit, I’m sure — actually makes the act even more horrific to watch.
Anyway: Creepy, messed up movie! But I’m putting it at the top of the list because it’s so wrong and so perverse that it must be seen (and, in a sense, appreciated) for showing how truly debased this genre is.
24. What’s Love Got To Do With It (1993)
I think I responded to Great Balls Of Fire! because in the process of researching this column, I sat through so many movies like 1987’s La Bamba, the story of ill-fated ’50s rock star Ritchie Valens. Whereas Great Balls Of Fire! has a protagonist who is too evil to deserve a musician biopic, La Bamba‘s subject is way too sweet. Having perished at age 17 in the same plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper on “the day the music died” in 1959, Valens didn’t live enough life to justify a life’s story. Plus, he was as pure as a glass of whole milk. (The film shows him at one point singing nursery rhymes for neighborhood school children. Sid And Nancy, this is not.) Apparently, the filmmakers realized the narrative problems with this, since La Bamba focuses almost equally on Ritchie’s scumbag brother. (Like Great Balls Of Fire!, this otherwise saccharine film has an uncomfortable rape scene involving a married couple.)
In this era, most musician biopics were essentially well-made TV movies, heavy on exposition and plot and light and style and vision. The most famous example of this “TV movie but in theaters” musician-biopic subgenre is What’s Love Got To Do With It, a film I put higher only because it makes the Jerry Lee-like character — Tina Turner’s infamously abusive husband Ike — the clearcut villain of the story. But even in this film, the cocaine-hoovering a-hole who cruelly runs roughshod over everyone in his orbit (played with scary intensity by Laurence Fishburne) ends up being the most interesting person. Maybe that’s why Turner herself later voiced objections to the movie, due to some factual inaccuracies and the prevailing depiction of her as a victim, no matter Angela Bassett’s magnetic lead performance.
23. The Jacksons: An American Dream (1992)
There’s an interesting (if that’s the right word, not sure it is) overlap between musician biopics and movies about domestic abuse. What’s Love Got To Do With It has mostly faded from popular consciousness, but it did implant the Tina and Ike story in the cultural memory as a signifier of intra-family violence. But that subject is also a narrative strain in other films about musicians, whether it’s battery among husbands and wives or parents (mostly fathers) and their children.
Joe Jackson, the patriarch of the Jackson family, is another such monster, and the torment he unleashed on his family members is the primary focus of this five-hour miniseries, even more than the kids who became world-dominating pop stars. Originally aired on ABC — right before The King Of Pop put out his eighth record, Dangerous — The Jacksons: An American Dream later became bedrock programming for VH1, which I swear used to show this movie every weekend for years in the late ’90s and early ’00s. As a result, I’ve likely seen An American Dream more than any other musician biopic, though the viewings usually unfolded in 20-minute intervals over countless airings (and often at parties when the sound was down).
“The VH1 movie” is a musician-biopic subgenre that will be explored further down this list. Again, if we operate from the premise that this is a debased genre with significant corniness properties baked in, “the VH1 movie” can be appreciated on its own terms. At a time when most cinematic biopics already had a “TV movie” feel, An American Dream had the benefit of being an actual TV movie, with hours of time to lay out the full scope of the family’s story. Whereas many musician biopics are forced to operate on a compressed time frame that undermines the size of the subject manner, An American Dream has the scale to justify the grandiose title. As for the depiction of Joe’s abuse, it’s toned down though not completely excised, which is surprising given the film’s “authorized” feel. (Meanwhile, Michael’s own history as an accused abuser isn’t explored, as the movie came out just before his first round of allegations.)
22. Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story (2001)
Another VH1 movie. I haven’t seen it in at least 20 years, but I’m not about to re-watch it now and ruin my warm memories. For those that complain that all musician biopics are the same, find me another movie about an English heavy metal band that must overcome the loss of their drummer’s right arm. In that extremely specific subgenre of the musician biopic, Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story is one-of-one.
21. Get On Up (2014)
More than any other film genre, possibly ever, the musician biopic lives and dies on the strength of the lead performance. The lead must be great. Workmanlike competence won’t cut it. The performance has to burn itself in the minds of the audience. For example: The only thing I remember from Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story is that Anthony Michael Hall plays the famous record producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange. And I recall him doing a really good job in the role. (It helps that Lange is a mysterious enigma who has rarely consented to being filmed or photographed, so I have no idea how close the performance is to the actual guy.)
I’ll give a better example: Chadwick Boseman as James Brown in Get On Up. He’s so phenomenal, he nearly matches the level of work put in by the real-life hardest working man in show business. If the film hadn’t flopped at the box office, I bet he would have won the Academy Award for Best Actor. As it is, he wasn’t even nominated, a true crime. (The winner that year was Eddie Redmayne for The Theory Of Everything, the century’s most famous “theoretical physicist biopic” film.) Overall, Get On Up is one of the more underrated modern musician biopics — director Tate Taylor actually brings some humor and real cinematic flair to the table, transcending the usual “TV movie” aesthetics of the genre, while also alluding (lightly, of course) to the subject’s dark side, including (naturally) acts of domestic violence.
20. A Complete Unknown (2024)
Playing a famous musician is viewed as a blatant ploy to win an Oscar. But this gambit works way less than you might think. You’re actually better off playing the queen of England or Idi Amin or the only famous female serial killer. Rami Malek winning for Bohemian Rhapsody or Jamie Foxx taking home Oscar gold for Ray are the exceptions. Women have had more luck than men overall, though it helps to play a country singer in a crowd-pleaser (like Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner’s Daughter or Reese Witherspoon in Walk The Line) or a star-crossed torch singer in a movie nobody on Earth remembers seeing (Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose or Renee Zellweger in Judy). Otherwise, if you’re a guy, it helps to play an obscure classical composer (F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus) or an Outlaw country dude who the public assumes is real but actually isn’t (Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart).
Our boy Timothée Chalamet went to great lengths to win a trophy for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, usually by talking in the press about how hard he worked to nail down the peculiar phrasing and vocal style of the character. Alas, he lost to Adrien Brody, who won his first Oscar playing a Jewish musician and composer in 2002’s The Pianist. Again: Obscurity is your friend here as an actor. Like F. Murray Abraham, Brody benefitted from playing a guy that the audience couldn’t compare in their memories to the real-life counterpart, a luxury that Chalamet clearly wasn’t afforded when he portrayed (quite well!) one of the most famous and imitated rock stars ever.
19. Last Days (2005)
Here’s another musician-biopic subgenre: The “proxy” musician biopic. It’s where the film isn’t technically about a famous musician, but rather a character closely based on a famous musician that conspicuously wink-wink-nudge-nudges toward the actual person. In Last Days, written and directed by Gun Van Sant, that person is Kurt Cobain. As the title suggests, we see “Blake,” as the film calls him, wander his mansion in a near-mute, catatonic state near the end of his life, as various zombie-like hangers-on come in and out of his orbit. (There’s also Kim Gordon, who supposedly plays an unnamed record executive but who really seems to be play-acting a scenario where Kim Gordon “rescues” Kurt from his fate.)
Last Days is not a “normal” musician biopic, and it’s easily the least conventionally entertaining movie I’ve mentioned so far (or will write about afterward). Like all of Van Sant’s “experimental” works, it’s more interesting as an intellectual exercise (in this case, a deconstruction of the “jampacked with career highlights” structure of most musician biopics) than an emotional one. When I was watching it, I kept thinking about Sid And Nancy, Alex Cox’s 1986 film about the toxic intersection of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. Both films cover similar thematic ground — the emptiness of celebrity, the debilitating effects of chronic drug use, and the failure of rock music to inspire genuine cultural revolution. The difference is that Last Days is quiet to the point of inscrutability, and Sid And Nancy is the most gratingly shrill musician biopic ever made. (Shoutout to Chloe Webb, whose depiction of Spungen is so accurate and evocative that it is legitimately impossible to watch.)
As a younger man, I had the tolerance for Sid And Nancy. At this point in my life, I choose Last Days.
18. Bird (1988)
As a biopic about a genius-addict musician, Bird is pitched somewhere between Last Days and Sid And Nancy. It’s both unrelentingly sad and striking in its stateliness. It was also directed by Clint Eastwood, the last person I would expect to express empathy for a big-time drug user and alcoholic. But Charlie Parker clearly meant a lot to him, and he leveraged his movie-star capital to make the least commercial film of his career. (Clint starred in the Dirty Harry movie The Dead Pool the same year.)
The “movie star leverages their capital to make a musician biopic” musician biopic is a small but notable subgenre that also includes Don Cheadle’s 2015 film Miles Ahead, a largely fictionalized look at Miles Davis’ life, and several Ethan Hawke movies, like the Chet Baker biopic Born To Be Blue and another film I’ll discuss later.
17. 8 Mile (2002)
Time for some more ultra-specific musician-biopic subgenres. This one is an “overqualified proxy” biopic, where the real-life subject plays his fake self. We’re truly through the meta-looking glass here! It’s a miracle this wasn’t a disaster, much less an Oscar-winning smash. It helps that a real director was involved — Curtis Hanson’s previous two films were L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys, which form with 8 Mile one of the more fascinating “imperial phase” trilogies for a great filmmaker. Eminem also proved to be a real actor, though he was in his comfort zone playing trailer-park Detroit rapper James “Jimmy” Smith Jr.
But what I want to know is this: Is starring in your own musician biopic bad luck? Eminem never made music as good as his pre-8 Mile era, and Hanson drifted from A-list status after this movie. And then there’s Mekhi Phiffer, the original hip-hop Future, who never capitalized on being the coolest person in an Eminem movie.
Is this why Robbie Williams opted to be portrayed by a GGI monkey in his musician biopic? If so, Robbie Williams is much smarter than I give him credit for.
16. Straight Outta Compton (2015)
Here’s a musician biopic where one of the main characters is played by the real-life person’s son. Nepotism aside, O’Shea Jackson really was the best choice to play Ice Cube. (Also, we might still need a paternity test to prove that LaKeith Stanfield is not Snoop Dogg’s kid.) Jackson’s close resemblance to his dad gives Straight Outta Compton the verisimilitude it needs to counteract Paul Giamatti as the scheming manager Jerry Heller, who feasts on the South Central LA scenery like the pizza buffet at Shakey’s (complimentary).
15. The Hours And Times (1991)
Here’s the most potentially controversial subgenre: the “speculative” musician biopic. It’s about real people, but the action is fictionalized. In the case of this relatively obscure 60-minute film, it relates to a vacation taken to Spain in 1963 by John Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein (which actually happened) and whether they hooked up sexually (rumored but not confirmed). Salacious subject matter aside, The Hours And Times is an absorbing psychological character study that feels almost like a documentary, due to the period-specific cinematography and the pitch-perfect portrayals of Epstein (David Angus) and Lennon (Ian Hart, who played the Walrus again three years later in Backbeat).
I’m not saying these guys actually did it, but if they did, I suspect it would have unfolded like this.
14. Two Of Us (2000)
Another “speculative” musician biopic involving John Lennon. Only this time it’s about John’s relationship with Paul McCartney. (Also, no intimations of gay sex this time.) In 1976, it’s known that Paul visited John at his apartment in the Dakota in Manhattan. It was the same day that Lorne Michaels jokingly offered The Beatles $3,000 to reform on Saturday Night Live, a proposition that John and Paul almost took him up on.
The rest of their hang that day, the film admits at the start, is fictionalized in Two Of Us, the best of the VH1 musician biopics. And by “best,” I mean the one I like the most, no matter the goofiness of Aidan Quinn’s unconvincing Liverpudlian accent as Paul. (On the other hand, Jared Harris — who later became famous as Lane Pryce on Mad Men — makes a pretty good meal out of exaggerating Lennon’s nasty snark.) Two Of Us, basically, is fan fiction, presenting a scenario where the warring Beatles make peace like two Ken dolls manipulated inside a doll house. But all musician biopics, on some level, do the same. It’s just that Two Of Us is more straight-forward as rock ‘n’ roll fantasy.
13. Elvis (2022)
As an Elvis fan, I dreaded seeing this movie and put it off for weeks. But when I finally relented, I was way more moved than I expected. Baz Luhrmann, to his credit, leans into the most fantastical aspects of the musician biopic here. If Bohemian Rhapsody is a trashy movie that tries to pass itself off as classy, Elvis is a classy production that revels in its trashiness, a far better option. I’m loathe to quote myself — though if Eminem can portray a fake Eminem in a movie, I guess I’m allowed — but I tried to get at the heart of my feelings about this in my 2024 book There Was Nothing You Could Do:
“Elvis doesn’t mythologize the titular subject, because the man has already been thoroughly mythologized for seventy years. (It’s like claiming that Mel Gibson “finally” mythologized Jesus in The Passion Of The Christ.) It also doesn’t attempt to demythologize him because that would be impossible. Instead, it rightly treats Elvis as an idea. Whereas most musician biopics lapse into the same garden- variety clichés parodied in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Luhrmann’s film is about clichés — the white kid drawn to black culture, the mama’s boy haunted by mama’s loss, the poor kid left unfulfilled by fame and riches, the lecherous manager who kills his golden goose — and why they still resonate so strongly.”
12. Bound For Glory (1976)
Woody Guthrie is one of the few figures who is as mythologized as Elvis. And Bound For Glory, like the book it is based on, plays into that by presenting a largely fictionalized account of Woody’s life. We see Woody picking on a guitar, riding the rails, hanging with the Okies, and embodying the national underclass. It might read as straight up hagiography if it hadn’t been made by one of the great film directors of the 1970s, Hal Ashby, who is able to bring some Dust Bowl naturalism to what is otherwise an American parable. (It’s also one of the most beautifully photographed movies of the era, with Oscar-winning cinematography courtesy of the great Haskell Wexler.)
11. Walk The Line (2005)
Speaking of Walk Hard — James Mangold was killed for the sins of many musician-biopic makers when his movie was used as the template for the ultimate musician-biopic parody. Though, again, I would assert that the makers of Walk Hard must have loved Mangold’s film a lot to capture its essence so thoroughly. What gets overlooked in retrospect is how Mangold insisted that his actors sing live rather than lip sync, a crucial improvement over so many other musician biopics (including some on this list) with concert scenes that sound and look flat and feeble. You can knock Walk The Line for the cliches of the genre that it’s come to embody — the declarative “Hey, it’s Roy Orbison!”-style cameos, the stock characters (the unsupportive wife, the unloving father), the way song titles get reappropriated as dialogue (“you can’t walk no line!”) — but the way it presents the music is spot-on and redeems the whole enterprise.
10. The Buddy Holly Story (1978)
More than 25 years before Walk The Line, this movie pioneered the practice of having actors play and sing live rather than lip sync, and it’s still the best (and hardest rocking) example. Upon release, The Buddy Holly Story was praised largely for the lead performance by Gary Busey — yes, that Gary Busey, the insane senior citizen who embarrasses himself on reality shows and by occasionally urinating in public. If that’s the only side of Busey you know, seeing him in The Buddy Holly Story will be a revelation. The script is pedestrian and the filmmaking is mostly nondescript. (The director went to make the Pauly Shore vehicle Son In Law and two direct-to-video Bring It On sequels.) But the musical performances — with fellow actors Charles Martin Smith and Don Stroud — are genuinely exciting.
Also: frequent Richard Pryor collaborator and future Chappelle’s Show star Paul Mooney plays Sam Cooke, an absolutely weird choice that works absolutely well.
9. Blaze (2018)
The best example of a movie star leveraging his capital to make a very uncommercial musician biopic, In this case, it was writer-director Ethan Hawke and the subject was Blaze Foley, the cult hero Texas singer-songwriter who was murdered in 1989 at the age of 39. Here is another example of a musician biopic that benefits from the protagonist being largely unknown. It plays less like a typical biopic and more like a movie about a fictional musician. It’s like a down-home, redneck version of Inside Llewyn Davis, with the perpetually drunk and drug-addled Blaze (a revelatory Ben Dickey) bobbing in and out of local dives in the shadow of a more famous troubled genius, Townes Van Zandt. Hawke cast the great guitarist Charlie Sexton to play Townes, an inspired choice in an otherwise expertly cast film. (Only Hawke would have thought to cast Richard Linklater as a sleazy oilman-turned-record label owner.) Most musician biopics are about communicating the greatness of an artist to an audience that already is aware of that greatness. Blaze has the generosity of spirit to resurrect the lost spirit of Blaze Foley and make it vividly alive once more.
8. Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)
Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of musician biopic performances. She won the Oscar for Best Actress the same year that Robert De Niro won for Raging Bull, one of the most iconic performances ever. But Spacek belongs in that company, for how she makes Loretta Lynn feel like a real character rather than the signifier of a legendary musician, a rare feat for movies like this. Coal Miner’s Daughter also features one of the great performances by a musician, with Levon Helm portraying Loretta’s father with maximum warmth and handsomeness.
7. Elvis (1979)
Remember what I said about Kurt Russell in 1981? This “TV movie” musician biopic directed by John Carpenter starred Russell two years before that. Thankfully, he already had enough coolness in the tank to pull off the greatest on-screen portrayal of The King Of Rock ‘N’ Roll.
6. Purple Rain (1984)
The ultimate “overqualified proxy” musician biopic. Though unlike 8 Mile, which seems to hew relatively close to the particulars of Eminem’s biography, I have my doubts about how much Purple Rain actually resembles Prince’s real life. After all, one of the film’s central conflicts — Prince must allow Wendy and Lisa to collaborate in the writing of the song “Purple Rain,” a microcosm of his micro-managing mania — has no basis in reality, as Prince wrote all of “Purple Rain” himself. (And he never curbed his micro-managing mania in any corner of his life.) But Purple Rain nevertheless gets the important parts correct — he lived in Minneapolis, he played kick-ass shows at First Avenue, he was misunderstood by less talented members of the local music scene, he looked cool riding a motorcycle, he (I’m guessing) encouraged beautiful women to purify themselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka, and so on.
5. The Doors (1991)
I’ll quote myself again: “Many (not all, but the majority) of my favorite musician biopics are not exactly ‘good’ in the usual sense. I like the ones that lean into their unavoidable corniness (usually without irony) and do it with love (or, at least, a charming guilelessness).” That’s Oliver Stone’s The Doors. You can hate this movie for having the dumb sequence where young Jim Morrison is marked for greatness by the ghost of a recently deceased Native American chief, or you can love this movie for that dumb sequence and many, many others. I’ve felt both ways over the years, but I’ve landed on adoring how The Doors takes rock mythology so seriously that it becomes transcendently ridiculous in the best possible way.
4. Velvet Goldmine (1998)
There are two musician biopics directed by Todd Haynes in my top four, and neither one of them are I’m Not There. That one has a clever conceit — have six people play the elusive Bob Dylan! — but the execution is often clumsy and way too literal. (Haynes also approaches rock mythology with extreme earnestness, but he falls short of transcendent ridiculousness, merely landing on just ridiculousness.) But this proxy biopic about David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop does have the sense of exhilarating fan-boy poetry that I’m Not There doesn’t pull off, with Haynes both celebrating and indicting his heroes throughout, sometimes at the same time. (The soundtrack is way better, too.)
3. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)
My other Todd Haynes musician biopic, and also the most high concept. Filmed over 10 days in 1985 while Haynes was a student at Bard College, it depicts the final weeks of Karen Carpenter’s life before she perished from anorexia. Instead of using actors, Haynes staged scenes using dolls, an inventive acknowledgement of the fantastical nature of the musician biopic genre. He also used The Carpenters’ music without permission, which eventually led to Superstar being withdrawn from circulation on copyright infringement grounds.
I suspect Karen’s brother and former bandmate Richard Carpenter also objected to the premise of Haynes’ film, which reads on the page as hipster snark directed at a soft-rock icon. But Superstar only seems like a trashy movie. It is actually one of the most moving and visceral musician biopics ever made, with the use of the dolls underscoring just how helpless Karen Carpenter was in the face of a dehumanizing and sexist record industry. Thankfully, it’s not hard to track down bootleg streams of Superstar online, and it’s recommended for anyone who thinks that it’s impossible to make an unusual, unconventional, and downright weird movie in this genre.
2. 24 Hour Party People (2002)
The greatest musician biopic that often doesn’t get counted as a musician biopic. In part because it’s not technically about a musician, but rather impresario and Factory Records co-owner Tony Wilson. And Steve Coogan, the brilliant comic actor, looks and sounds nothing like the real Wilson in this movie. But that doesn’t matter. It never matters in movies like this. Nailing the essence is what matters, and Coogan hits that essence like a ball peen hammer. Beyond that, 24 Hour Party People is really two movies in one — the first hour is about Joy Division, and the second is about Happy Mondays. And they’re both riveting, tragic, and hilarious. Probably the most re-watchable movie overall on this list.
1. Amadeus (1984)
Here we have a biopic about one of the most famous musicians who ever lived. And yet, nobody who will see the movie knows what the real Mozart was like. And that makes him uniquely perfect for the musician biopic treatment. Amadeus compounds that advantage by basing the story on the perspective of an outsider to Mozart, his rival Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), who serves as a proxy for the audience. Like all of us, Salieri is just a regular guy who can’t quite comprehend true genius. And that saves the film from trying to explain that genius, a common trap for biopics of any kind. Amadeus lets us witness an artistic giant while grounding us a highly relatable “petty and jealous schlub” point of view. It’s a great movie about how greatness is unattainable for most of us.
