What has BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY wrought?!
Over the past five years and across nearly a thousand write-ups for The Film Experiences, you might have denoted my slight distaste for biopics. To be fair, "slight" might be an understatement. I bring this up to admit my bias against these projects, often conventional to a fault and dripping with mercenary intent. But even if you're a fan of them, you must admit there's been a disproportionate influx of these productions in the past few years, especially in the context of dramas about musicians. It's likely a consequence of Bohemian Rhapsody's immense success at the box office and with awards groups, generating a thousand copycats that may not reach the depths of its ignobility but still plateau at a level of miserable mediocrity.
As Timothée Chalamet is hounded by paparazzi on the set of his Bob Dylan biopic, the Bohemian Rhapsody editor announces his directorial debut, and Back to Black spits on the memory of Amy Winehouse in theaters, let's discuss…
One of the most obnoxious aspects of the current biopic craze is the sense of redundancy. So many of them take cues from age-old conventions that the result arrives with a sheen of anonymity. It needn't be so, and a few filmmakers have shown that the biopic model can be a place worthy of artistic exploration, perhaps experimentation. Two names come to mind. There's Pablo Larraín, whose portraits of historical women have broken themselves in paroxysms of performance. In Jackie, he touched on constructing historical records and mythmaking as an actor's job in the public theater of politics. At the same time, formal ingenuity pulled the tone into something close to horror. Similarly, Spencer was a ghost story more than a Princess Diana puff piece.
I can only imagine his upcoming Maria Callas biopic will follow in its antecessors' footsteps. Todd Haynes has also explored the plasticity of biopics, going so far as to question the form's own legitimacy in exercises like Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, and May December. Not to mention that he's also given us a Bob Dylan movie of sorts with I'm Not There. Though flirting with too many juxtapositions and divagations, the mosaic has so much to say about the figure of Dylan in culture that it's hard to imagine a more conventional piece serving as anything more than an easy cash-in and awards push for its boy wonder star. Then again, surprises can happen, and it's good to keep an open mind.
Apologies for sounding like such a grump on this matter. After all, why let bad cinema take place in one's mind when there's so much good stuff worth celebrating out there? Yes, even biopics. Even musician's biopics released in the past few years. Elvis and Priscilla make for a fascinating diptych of diametrically opposed intentions, though they both circle many of the same figures. The latter even cracked my 2023 top ten. Serebrennikov's Leto was plenty inventive, and Rocketman was quite fun. Lords of Chaos played well as a tragedy, and Aline was a riotous affair. And despite my numerous misigivings, at least Maestro was bursting with ambition at the level of form and extravagant performance.
Better remember those than I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Respect, Stardust, the aforementioned Bohemian Rhapsody and Back to Black. At some point, every film has the potential to be good, expectations be damned.
What about you, dear reader? Are you also tired of music biopics, or can't you get enough of them?