Why Can’t Music Biopics Be Good?

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Nick Delaney/Twentieth Century Fox/Everett Collection, Jason McDonald/Netflix, Dean Rogers/Focus Features

Music biopics thin to travel the aforesaid beats: A delicate and singular endowment excessively axenic for this satellite wants to make but falls prey to the lure of fame and drugs and a civilization of exploitation that the movie usually perpetuates but is uninterested successful examining. Still, since 2018, erstwhile the definitive atrocious euphony biopic of our time, Bohemian Rhapsody, won aggregate Oscars, Hollywood has appeared obsessed with them. (Movies astir Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Linda Ronstadt are successful the works.) The latest introduction successful this vexing class is the questionable caller Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black. To “celebrate,” we’re ranking the caller musical-biopic canon from the champion of the worst to the adjacent worser.

Thumbing its chemoreceptor astatine pesky biopic mainstays similar facts and gravitas, this movie honors the parody creator by staging his root communicative arsenic a parody film. Daniel Radcliffe gamely mocks utmost histrion transformations portion pulling disconnected a wholly committed impression. Still, it occasionally plays similar a Walk Hard screen band.

When Rocketman is astatine its best, arsenic erstwhile Taron Egerton blasts disconnected from Dodger Stadium into the entity arsenic a literal rocket-man specified seconds aft overdosing, it’s arsenic ridiculous and fabulous arsenic Elton John himself. Unfortunately, those moments are excessively fewer and acold betwixt for the movie to afloat congeal. The characterization is mostly lone aboveground level, and the crippled flies done emblematic biopic beats.

Once your eyes set to the brain-breaking representation of shrunken-down writer-director-actress Valérie Lemercier playing a 5-year-old girl, this unsanctioned Céline Dion biopic provides a fascinating recap of the singer’s prodigious endowment and career. If much biopics felt this unbound by property obligations, bully taste, and reality, the genre mightiness person country for much absorbing features. Maybe don’t spot me, though. I liked Cats.

​​Any excuse for Renée Zellweger to get onscreen successful a flashy formal and freakin’ sing again is simply a bully happening successful my book, adjacent if Judy ends up maudlin and slow. Zellweger’s Judy Garland is highly mannered, a fable entombed successful her lifetime, and portion this movie skips galore of the accustomed book-report beats, it lacks propulsion.

The Baz Luhrmann epic is undoubtedly entertaining. Austin Butler plays Elvis truthful Method that the shade of Elvis mightiness person really taken power of his vocal cords. There are electrifying sequences here, similar erstwhile Elvis archetypal seduces an full assemblage of women, but the movie is overly long, and you can’t truly telephone Tom Hanks’s show arsenic Elvis’s manager good, contempt his efforts.

After an awards play of Maestro discourse, don’t we each cognize what this happening is? An Oscar-hungry task that is mostly a tribute to director-star Bradley Cooper’s ambition. At the aforesaid time, it’s a sometimes shockingly unusual movie that (albeit unintentionally) is overmuch much engrossing than it has immoderate close to be. Just ticker the scenes successful which Cooper shouts “I’m reining it in!” similar a horror-movie villain.

Look, this Lee Daniels movie is simply a mess, but it’s a well-acted mess. Andra Day’s fierce and earthy pb show is compelling capable to marque the movie worthy watching adjacent erstwhile the watching is rough. But the movie inactive has an unfortunate American Horror Story pallor, 1 that’s compounded by Daniels’s dull and fragmented pacing.

A movie that has Jennifer Hudson singing a slew of Aretha Franklin songs tin lone beryllium truthful bad. Plus you’ve got Mary J. Blige flipping tables and shouting arsenic Dinah Washington — what much could you inquire for? Well, possibly a small much story, actually. Respect is somewhat excessively deferential to Franklin, ne'er allowing Hudson’s Aretha to look arsenic thing little than a saint. Boring.

Naomi Ackie does an awesome occupation lip-syncing Houston. But it’s a bid of biopic clichés: Whitney and her person and sometimes person Robyn Crawford screaming erstwhile they archetypal perceive her opus connected the radio, cause usage starring to a dizzy spell amid screaming crowds and camera flashes, overwrought moments of sobriety earlier a relapse. Of course, BoRhap’s Anthony McCarten wrote this, too.

This is not a movie for radical funny successful Marley’s communicative oregon authorities — it’s a movie for radical who cognize Marley from the college-dorm posters. And really, that’s each it amounts to: a fan-made task that refuses to delve into Marley arsenic a complicated, existent person. His narration with his wife, Rita, is peculiarly unfraught, arsenic is emblematic of biopics astir men with wives.

Marisa Abela, who is truthful cleanable and stannable arsenic Yasmin connected Industry, puts connected her champion “Oy, mista!” dependable to play the gone-too-soon icon of the aughts whom the British tabloids precise good whitethorn person hounded to death. The movie spends truthful overmuch clip trying to reclaim her arsenic wholesome (loves her nan, doggedly monogamous, wants children) that her transgressive streak and naughty consciousness of wit ringing false.

This manic Freddie Mercury biopic is casual to hatred for galore reasons: its unearned Oscar wins; the absorption by Bryan Singer, who got Me Too’d earlier the movie came out; the information that it is simply a straight-seeming biopic of Freddie Mercury. Bohemian Rhapsody is similar the bland-cover mentation of Freddie’s life; its creators forgot that helium was really precise absorbing (and super-gay).