Rebecca Shaw Stop Making Music Biopics

Please stop making music biopics. We need a break from this tired genre that is essentially expensive karaoke | Rebecca Shaw

With the release of Michael and not one but four Beatles feature films under way, I am once again calling for a moratorium on these films (with one exception)

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In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of discussion around the new Michael Jackson biopic. It is a film that has seen huge success at the box office, while receiving mixed (mostly negative) reviews.

It has been skewered as a shallow film, more like a well-performed playlist of Michael Jackson songs than a deep dive into his complicated story. The movie also ends in 1988, a seemingly deliberate choice to avoid having to reckon with the darker aspects of his life that followed.

I am not here to prosecute Michael Jackson or Michael the film (I won’t be seeing it), but it has driven me to once again say: we need a moratorium on musical biopics.

This is not a new thought from me. In fact if there were a biopic of my life, part of it would be me complaining about musical biopics; complaints that grew in strength after witnessing Bohemian Rhapsody, a movie I believe to be a gay hate crime.

This is not to say I think it’d be easy to do biopics better – in fact I think they are one of the hardest genres to make enjoyable and satisfying. Biopic film-makers are often trapped between competing obligations. Whether dealing with a living subject or a dead one, the artist’s reputation and wishes come into play, as well as rights clearances, access to catalogues, cooperation from family members and musical co-creators – all things that can easily flatten and compromise the telling of someone’s story.

And yet we still continue to try, over and over. In recent years we’ve seen biopics about Bob Dylan, Elton John, (two about) Elvis, Robbie Williams, Bruce Springsteen and Amy Winehouse. In production currently are FOUR Beatles biopics, with a separate feature film planned for each member. As with a lot of these movies, the conversation tends to revolve around who is playing the character, how much they look like them or not, how much they sound like them or not (anyone remember months of conversation about Austin Butler’s Elvis voice?), whether the movie is true to life, and so on.

The main characters of biopics are so familiar to us that the discussion and viewing experience often centres on comparison over content. These are people we are already familiar with, stories we already know, performances we’ve already seen the real versions of. The worst result is essentially expensive karaoke.

Aren’t we tired? Wouldn’t it be a good time after four individual Beatles movies to have a break from this genre? Or at least a break from legacy films about already canonised, deeply famous men? At least Robbie Williams tried something new by making himself into a monkey. I would rather watch something experimental like that, or a film that focused on the bit players with interesting perspectives, or on influential musicians whose lives we don’t know much about. I want films about people whose stories have been distorted or misunderstood.

Despite my aversion to the genre and its pitfalls, for a long time I have been wishing for (and now might be getting) a biopic about Cass Elliot from the Mamas and the Papas. You might know her as “Mama Cass”, but did you know she strongly disliked being called that? She had an extremely interesting and sad career, and her life is still overshadowed by a cruel and false myth about the circumstances of her death, and the life-destroying fatphobia she received could very easily be mapped on to the society we currently live in.

If I am ever to watch a musical biopic again in my life, I will need it to be telling a story that speaks to something meaningful. If it’s another prestige recreation of a man’s songs and the boring beats of his life of fame, I won’t be going. You can put that in my biopic.