Music Biopics and the Line Between Entertainment and Reality
Lately it feels like a new music biopic about a music legend is being announced. There have been huge success stories with biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvis, and A Complete Unknown.
Many more are being announced left and right; such as Selena Gomez playing Linda Ronstadt, Colman Domingo as Nat King Cole, Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen, and even Lizzo as Sister Rosetta Tharp.
Most notably, the biopics for The Beatles were announced, all four Beatles to be exact, with major internet talk on the casting.
The rise of these music biopics started in 2018, with Rami Malek starring as Queen’s Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. There was backlash from some critics, but the overall box office was hit with $900 million in ticket sales and the movie won a total of four academy awards.
Rocket Man, the story of Elton John, came to the box office a year later, receiving around $195 million.
Musical biopics flourish because they tap into human emotions like nostalgia, reverence, and the ability to revel in greatness up close. They offer fans an all-access pass to the lives of their favorites, told through an actor. They bring feelings and drama. One thing fans always want is to feel included.
And that's the key. These documentaries are dramatizations, meant to move us, not to fact-check us.
Truth becomes flexible, sequences become re-imagined, experiences can be exaggerated or even invented entirely to represent dramatic moments.
For example, Bohemian Rhapsody re-arranged incidents from Queen's history, climaxing with a fictionalized Live Aid performance that was positioned as a comeback after years apart, including a dramatic reunion scene and revelation of Freddy Mercury's terminal diagnosis. In fact, Queen had been on tour right up to Live Aid and at that time, Freddy Mercury did not know he was HIV-positive.
The movie certainly had a flexible relationship with the facts, but a tight one with the impact.
So why do they do this? Because real life has no bang-on narrative arc.
Art requires that structure, conflict, and resolution. When life itself does not provide those, the script does.
There is a further reason why music biopics tend to neutralize the more messy parts in their subjects' lives; image management.
A lot of music biopics are made with the approval (or even participation) of the artists or the estates of the artists. This means that any creative input that the artist or estate agrees to can come with conditions, such as the willingness to change potentially damaging portrayals of the artist and omit or downplay controversies.
In the end, we wind up with a story that is palatable, and often sanitized.
For example, in Elvis, Baz Luhrmann's boisterous vision of the King of Rock 'n' Roll used style over substance, as shown in how the film hinted at Presley's struggles with addiction and controversial relationship with a young Priscilla, but only barely.
Similarly, Respect, the Aretha Franklin biopic starring Jennifer Hudson, was perceived by many as so reverent that it left out some of the more controversial and unflattering aspects of her life.
Some would consider this to be falsifying truth, while others might simply say that it’s show business.
Even if we know a music biopic is inaccurate or embellishing the truth, we consume the media voraciously.
The people want to believe in the legend. We want to believe we’re watching the real person behind the music—even if it’s a beautifully acted fabrication.
Music helps, of course. It's the ultimate emotional shortcut. Even when we know the timeline has been distorted or the dialogue is entirely fictitious, we get caught up in the pleasure of it.
There's also more and more debate about what is acceptable to alter and what is too much. Are we meant to expect artistic license, or demand more veracity?
At what point does tribute become a whitewash?
Critics have begun to call for a new version of the music biopic; something that honors the person and the impact they had but does not sanctify, and something that isn't afraid to show the darker aspects that accompany fame. And, with streaming services taking both risks and allowing a certain flexibility of creativity, this may happen.
Music biopics bend the truth. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. But the reason we keep watching them isn’t because we’re looking for a history lesson, it’s because we want to feel something.
These movies let us believe, even for a couple of hours, that we’re seeing the soul behind the superstar. It doesn’t matter if the facts are fuzzy.
And let’s be honest: sometimes the myth just makes a better story.
Written by Shaughnessy Hoefer