With every passing 12 months, it turns into tougher to disclaim that Stroll Arduous: The Dewey Cox Story from 2007, Jake Kasdan’s cult comedy a couple of fictitious rocker’s rise and drug-addled fall is likely to be essentially the most prescient Hollywood movie of the twenty first century.
Borrowing liberally from the 2005 Johnny Money biopic Stroll the Line the movie skewers rock biopic cliches as mercilessly as Airplane! lampooned catastrophe film tropes. Its hero, Dewey (John C Reilly) blames himself for his brother’s demise, ascends to fame, falls for a singer who isn’t his spouse, rubs shoulders with the Beatles, descends into medicine, goes to rehab, will get clear, and – by the movie’s finish – makes a triumphant return to the stage.
Although it bombed on launch, Stroll Arduous feels stronger annually, pre-emptively ridiculing the endlessly proliferating music biopics that stroll straight-faced into the cliches it mocked. (“Haven’t these folks seen Stroll Arduous?” critics reflexively ask.) These days, the style appears to be in full bloom: Again to Black, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s profile of Amy Winehouse, is hitting UK cinemas this week, with a cloud of controversy swirling round its portrayal of the late star’s troubled life. Now comes information that The Bear star Jeremy Allen White will match his chiseled abs into Bruce Springsteen’s white tees for a movie in regards to the making of his album Nebraska.
In the meantime, in February this 12 months, Sam Mendes introduced that he’s at work on a Beatles biopic. Besides it’s not only one biopic; Mendes plans to direct 4 feature-length movies – one from every Beatle’s perspective – all for launch in 2027. Even essentially the most religious Beatles obsessives have strained to contemplate this a good suggestion.
It’s time to confess: we’ve reached Peak Music Biopic. Let’s give it a relaxation. Excluding Maestro (which, regardless of its flaws, absolutely displays Bradley Cooper’s imaginative and prescient and artistry), these films really feel much less like auteur-driven cinema than estate-sanctioned workouts in model administration, with their straightforward, IP-adjacent attraction juiced by entry to famend songbooks. Simply as Heaven’s Gate now epitomises the hubris of the New Hollywood period, this quadrupedal Beatles venture could come to symbolise the indulgent extra of right now’s musical biopics.
Rock biopics weren’t all the time a certain wager for Hollywood. Thirty-plus years in the past, Nice Balls of Fireplace! and The Doorways underperformed on the field workplace and yielded blended critiques. However within the mid-2000s, Ray and Stroll the Line proved {that a} good biopic may transcend its system, entice a multigenerational viewers and win Oscars. (Cynically talking, each movies had been additionally aided by the then-recent deaths of their topics, although each had been sturdily made and well-acted regardless of their boilerplate arcs.)
That one-two punch ushered within the new age of rock biopics, and set the template for Stroll Arduous to skewer: younger rocker rises from poverty, turns into a sensation, falls into medicine and temptation. “We tried to kill the musical biopic with this film,” Reilly later mirrored. “It seems it’s a really resilient cliche.”
Resilient certainly. The style solely proliferated. Some specimens had been extra fascinating than others: Todd Haynes eschewed the same old cliches together with his 2007 biopic-as-collage I’m Not There, a intentionally obfuscating portrait of the intentionally obfuscating Bob Dylan.
Alas, the current crop of biopics has been far worse. Bohemian Rhapsody squandered a powerful Rami Malek efficiency by egregiously rearranging the info of Freddie Mercury’s life (no, he wasn’t recognized with HIV earlier than Stay Help). Rocketman leaned on cornball fantasy sequences and kooky prospers to disguise what’s, at core, a formulaic Elton John biopic. Its messy hybrid of jukebox musical and biopic additionally muddles up the chronology of John’s profession.
And but these films stay worthwhile. This 12 months’s Bob Marley: One Love is a fitfully fascinating, overly reverent portrait of the reggae singer that struggles to articulate Marley’s political consciousness past a feelgood haze of pot smoke and peace platitudes, nevertheless it was a box-office success. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, an overwrought, razzle-dazzle fever dream, narrated by Tom Hanks sounding like a Southern-fried Werner Herzog, took in $288m in 2022.
Apparently, that movie’s sanitised narrative – obscuring the truth that Priscilla Presley was a minor when Elvis romanced her – created a gap for Sofia Coppola to make a much more complicated movie centred round Priscilla herself.
The glut of biopics feels emblematic of an period during which we refuse to let lifeless celebrities stay lifeless. Any deceased star is simply ready to be reanimated for posthumous revenue. Take into account the morbid spectacle of the hologram tour, which has turned 3D avatars of Frank Zappa, Whitney Houston and others into undead points of interest. Synthetic intelligence guarantees extra grotesque resurrections. A meditation app just lately launched a bedtime story “narrated” by an AI-generated Jimmy Stewart voice, whereas George Carlin’s property sued a podcast that claimed to have used AI to imitate the comic’s voice and standup type.
The irony is that the perfect music films of the previous decade aren’t actually biopics in any respect. They’re fictitious character research, just like the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a mordant, richly detailed portrait of a Sixties folksinger struggling to make it, or Tár, Todd Area’s hypnotic examination of a world-renowned conductor’s unravelling. Like Stroll Arduous, these movies crackle with verve and creativeness, depict precise milieux, and make their titular heroes appear as actual as Dylan or Leonard Bernstein.
However as a result of they aren’t rooted in acquainted tales and pre-existing again catalogues, such films are inclined to make studios nervous. They’re riskier than a Marley biopic, or a Springsteen one, or a Winehouse one. They’re works of the creativeness, a useful resource Hollywood ought to give attention to cultivating. As John Lennon famously mentioned, “With meditation, there’s no restrict to what we are able to … think about.”
Oh wait, that’s simply a Stroll Arduous quote.
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