In the past decade, music biopics have become unavoidable. It seems that every year a new film about an iconic musician comes out and captures audience attention. Biopics have always been extremely successful at the box office. They come with a built in audience. If viewers are fans of a popular figure, they will come to see a film about their lives. When an artist is a massive cultural figure, like the incomparable Michael Jackson, viewers who haven’t seen a movie in theaters in years will come out of the woodwork to watch the film like it’s an event.
This trend of music biopics acting as modern day blockbusters can be tracked to the 2018 film, Bohemian Rhapsody. The film chronicles the career trajectory of classic rock band Queen, specifically its lead singer Freddie Mercury. While Bohemian Rhapsody was a major boxoffice success, grossing over $900 million dollars, it was heavily scrutinized by both critics and audiences for its inaccuracy.
Writing for the BBC, Nicholas Barber said the film “looks like a daytime soap opera and it runs through the same chord progression as every previous rock biopic.” The critique of the Bohemian Rhapsody largely surrounds its portrayal of Freddie Mercury’s queerness. The film spends more of its runtime developing the relationship between Mercury (Rami Malek) and his ex-fiancee/lifelong friend Mary Austin (Lucy Boyton) than it does exploring his relationship with his sexuality. Viewers claimed this choice was made to sanitize Mercury life as an appeal to the largely heterosexual mainstream.
This critique of Bohemian Rhapsody can be seen in many of the most popular music biopics of recent years. These films don’t dive deep on who this artist was as a person or reveal another side of them not seen by the public. Instead, they often reiterate the timeline leading up to the artist’s success and recreate their greatest hits. These films focus on the lead actor’s performance as the celebrity. A performance in a biopic is judged based on how close an actor can mimic a real person.
This structure works to reduce how much true character work the film needs to do. Mainstream audiences who come to the movies to be entertained would rather see Jafar Jackson recreate choreography of the iconic Thriller music video down to minute detail than learn about who Michael Jackson really was. Part of the appeal of these films is voyeuristic. We want to see what celebrities are like behind closed curtains, the good, the bad and the ugly.
Michael, typical of the genre, uses Michael Jackson’s extensive and illustrious career as a crutch to gloss over the reality of his life. The film was marketed as a peek into the life of one of the most iconic musicians and performers of all time. Michael is not about Michael Jackson the man, its about Michael Jackson the persona.
