Every year, Hollywood pumps out at least one or two musician biopics. Last year alone saw the release of “Back to Black,” a portrait of the late Amy Winehouse, and the Oscar-nominated “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan origin story as told by James Mangold. It’s easy to understand why we keep getting these films: they’re pretty popular. Sure, some of them flop, but more often than not, there seems to be an insatiable hunger from the public to watch actors slap on a wig and do an impression of a famous singer. And studios are often all-in because not only are there box office dollars at work, but if filmmakers and actors play their cards right, awards season glory comes calling.
“Bohemian Rhapsody,” the 2018 film about Queen singer Freddie Mercury, did boffo box office and scored several nominations, winning Rami Malek a Best Actor trophy, and all of this despite the fact that the film itself is rather lousy. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with making a musician biopic, they’ve become so standard that producers and filmmakers have adopted a rote, rigid formula for pumping them out. This formula is so ingrained into the subgenre that it was brilliantly parodied by Jake Kasdan’s hilarious 2007 pic “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” a film that so perfectly takes the piss out of the musician biopic that it probably would’ve killed the subgenre forever … if only it hadn’t been a flop.
While there are some bright spots here and there — all things considered, “A Complete Unknown” is pretty good — musician biopics often underwhelm, mainly because they’re all following that same damn formula: a musician is born, they rise to fame, they meet other famous musicians along the way, they suffer some sort of downfall (usually due to drug addiction), they have a triumphant return that enshrines their legacy for all time. It seems that the best way to break out of this vicious, frequently boring cycle is to ignore it completely, which is probably why the best musician biopic of all time is Miloš Forman’s brilliant “Amadeus,” a movie that makes the bold decision to both ignore formula and say to hell to historical accuracy.