Music biopics: why are they so bad and hated?

Just to spin off the discussion from the Michael Jackson thread, there have been a lot of these recently, mostly terrible. Why are so many of them so bad and why do the few good ones work?

Bohemian Rhapsody: Homophobic plot, directed by a sex offender, worst editing ever, bad.
Elvis: Haven't seen this but some friends say it's good because it goes for extravagant magic realism instead of trying to play it straight
Rocketman: Saw a lot of this on TV, seemed like a very average TV movie kind of thing.
Stardust: Also haven't seen this, the Bowie estate apparently has a blanket ban on biopics and stopped them using his music, very wise.

Here are a load of other recent ones I haven't seen:

A Complete Unknown
Back to Black
Better Man
Bob Marley: One Love
Respect
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
The United States vs. Billie Holiday
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Weird is a parody fyi (expanding on a fake trailer made for Funny Or Die sixteen years ago)

It’s not bad and I didn’t hate it

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

An outlier, because this is not a real biopic and is very funny (on purpose). But I'd argue most are bad and hated because they are just reenactments of well-documented events, minus historical accuracy and plus maudlin sentimentality and other distracting boilerplate bullshit. Which is to say, boring and pointless. Though the Robbie Williams one does replace him with a CGI ape-man, I suppose that is something different. To what end, I'll never know.

the United States vs. Billie Holiday is egregiously historically inaccurate, so, par for the course

How many people saw Better Man thinking it was the Eddie Vedder story?

Answer: No one saw Better Man

anyway, the real answer is: existing IP, nostalgia, the concurrent popularity of jukebox musicals on Broadway and the West End

Another question could be what separates the good biopics from the bad. "Amadeus" benefits from no one knowing what Mozart himself looked or sounded like, etc., but there are other ones that have been good. "Coal Miner's Daughter," "8 Mile" kind of figures it out in a meta sort of way, "La Bamba" is solid, "Control" (or "24 Hour Party People"), "Sid and Nancy" ... these all have qualities beyond merely recreating the recording session for the act's biggest pop hit or some famous concert appearance or whatever.

The four Beatles biopics are coming out next year I think. I will inevitably watch them, but no great expectations there.

Anyone making a music biopic shoild ve forced to watch Walk Hard at least three times

I've heard Better Man isn't bad, but I'm not going to subject myself to the music of Robbie Williams.

I'm Not There and The Hours and Times are great films, and neither was conceived as promotional pieces, which is why most (if not all) of the above was done. The former was a personal project conceived by Todd Haynes - he had to gain Dylan's approval to use his work, but that's the only say Dylan's camp really had on the film. Meanwhile The Hours and Times was a scrappy indie film that had to be done without authorization.

They're not quite great films, but I also enjoy Sid and Nancy and Bird a lot despite their flaws. Round Midnight with Dexter Gordon is sometimes referred to as a biographical film, which fudges the definition of the term. Francis Paudras's memoir is the starting point and makes up much of the framework, but Dexter Gordon's character (essentially the lead character whereas Paudra is a supporting one) is complete fiction, with details drawn from Lester Young and Bud Powell but not in a way that should be mistaken for a biographical depiction. It's an excellent film regardless.

Ray and Cash are both decent iirc

Yeah, the Cash biopic is awesome and is a great example of why Bohemian Rhapsody and A Complete Unknown sucked to me. Walk the Line wasn't really about Johnny Cash, it was about his relationship with June Carter Cash in the shadow of all these things that happen in his career. It's a love story that takes place in a historic timeline based on actual events.

There's a lot of stories that could be told with Michael and it doesn't look they went with any of them

This is predictably terrible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_Is_Mine

I don't remember much about Ray at this late date but I love the scene where an audience member gets super pissed off at him for "stealing gospel music"

I think A Complete Unknown is great, Coal Miner's Daughter and Sweet Dreams really good, and a few others okay--Brian Wilson, NWA, Johnny Cash, etc. If the Alan Freed film American Hot Wax counts, that's also great, and if Grace of My Heart counts for Carole King, also really good. I avoid most of them, and would almost always rather see a documentary, although many of those lapse into the generic. Would love to see a good Cass Elliot biopic.

I liked the Runaways one too

would almost always rather see a documentary

There may be exceptions, but on first glance, I think this tends to reflect which films are actually great films. Dont Look Back and No Direction Home are great but I'm Not There isn't diminished by them, they're all great films I'd want to see again. There's no competing with seeing the Beatles as themselves (or even as fictionalized versions of themselves in A Hard Day's Night, but The Hours and Times doesn't really compete with that even if John Lennon is one of the central characters, it holds up as a great film (technically a speculative one, but in this particular case it's fine).

Beyond those two, there isn't anything else that comes to mind. Sid and Nancy feels diminished when I tune into the Sex Pistols. Only a couple of brief pieces of film exist of Charlie Parker, so it's not like there's a fully-formed image of him burned into the public conscience, but Bird still has annoying bits like the way they inflate the cymbal-tossing story (pre-saging what Whiplash does with it).

*public consciousness

Weird is very funny, much like Walk Hard it was way better than I expected it to be, but yes actual biopics that play it straight tend to suck. Elvis's was good because it was purposely insane

I just saw Saturday night the 2025 film biopic EL Sett about Egyptian singing legend Um Kulthum that was directed by an Egyptian director and is in Arabic with English subtitles. I don't know much of her history but I enjoyed this 2 hrs and 40 minutes melodramatic epic with an actress doing a great job of playing the 20th century diva star Kulthum and it seemed that most of the Filmfest DC audience (many who seemed to understand Arabic) enjoyed it by their cheers near the end and reactions throughout. I haven't googled to see if the accuracy is discussed online or what is left out. I don't even know if there is a documentary on her.

As I noted on the Um Kulthum thread - I liked a scene in the movie where Kulthum goes into a studio to record a record for the first time and her vocal is so powerful (while still tuneful) into the mic that it immediately sends the gauge on the engineer's board way into the red. The engineer asks her to step back a step, and again it goes into the red. After another step, he finally has the band move back and Kulthum move back towards the band and finally the levels stay within a proper range.

Now whether that actually ever happened, I don't know. Over the closing credits the film suddenly cut to what appeared to be actual photos of Kulthum and footage of her state funeral in Egypt that was attended by a massive crowd.

I wrote about the Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie. I liked it a lot. (Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is pretty good, too, but I swear she's in some kind of contest with Paul Schrader to see which one of them can make the same movie more times.)

There's a Japanese biopic of avant-garde saxophonist Kaoru Abe in which Keiji Haino plays himself; I'd love to watch it, but I've never been able to find a subtitled version streaming anywhere.

Just remembered another bad one: The Fabulous Dorseys (1947). Tommy & Jimmy play themselves, except they are both in their 40s and not at all convincing as their younger selves, their acting is so bad that they aren't even convincing playing their own story. The small upside is that you get real concert performances from their bands, but both bands are very much on the slide by 1947, so even that's far from peak. Typical "came across it on Talking Pictures on afternoon" kind of film.

Haven't seen it but the Bobby Darin bipoic with Kevin Spacey in the lead role, despite being eight years older than Darin was when he died, didn't seem like a great idea.

I'd be surprised if a biopic managed to come anywhere close to Todd Haynes' VU documentary. I also loved the PBS Miles Davis documentary enough (not everyone did) that I don't have any desire to see the Don Cheadle film.

Jimi: All is By My Side with André 3000 wasn't great, and had some awkwardnesses, but it captured a certain melancholy that isn't the most public side of the Hendrix mythology.

I wish there was a more expansive Miles Davis documentary, but it would be hard to compete with his memoir - there's quite a bit like his unflattering depiction of Charlie Parker that would probably get watered down, especially if it was a film done for PBS.

it would be hard to compete with his memoir

tbf it's hard to compete with Szwed's bio too! what a book.

No-one's mentioned Control yet? one of my favourite music biopics, with an extraordinary central performance by Sam Riley as Ian Curtis.

the Cheadle film is almost worth it for his performance, it's almost sad that that perfect piece of casting is wasted on a not-great script -- "almost" because I have loathed music biopics for a long time, though I do like a couple of the praised ones mentioned (e.g., Coal Miner's Daughter). someone should figure out a way to use him as Miles again like Val Kilmer in True Romance.

speaking of Val, I remember thinking The Doors was, let's say, interesting though I am not eager to revisit that opinion

Oh sorry, Josh did mention it xp

haha yeah The Doors is a hot mess but "bad and hated" is a stretch

(xp)

I still love The Glenn Miller Story even though it is somewhat Disney-fied.

xp lol yeah my primary residual sense is that it is An Oliver Stone Film, which is a different category

I think the answer is that a good biopic has to be able to stand on its own artistically as a film first and foremost - acting, script/story, direction, etc. - which I suppose is, ironically enough, pretty rockist. But a lot of these biopics, if you took out all the familiar behind the music/best of beats, there's just nothing there.

I didn't see the Springsteen one and don't plan to, but I have read the book, and I do think it was intriguing that it focuses on this really specific non-crowd pleaser slice of his life (the making of "Nebraska" and his depression). Though I suppose I am also intrigued at how the film apparently still falls into all the familiar biopic cliches *despite* being on paper a more unconventional biopic.

I generally liked A Complete Unknown, but I also considered how much more interested I might have been had it been about Pete Seeger, with Bob as a supporting character/cameo, than as yet another take on the familiar Dylan creation myth, as fine as that take was.

I keep typing and deleting and typing and deleting. Basically: biopics are always gonna be bad because a musician's life is never as big-screen interesting as one would think, but it's far-more interesting than one would ever expect, just in subtle ways. Everybody should watch "Step Across The Border". I'm gonna watch it again tonight. Not a biopic but it's something else and something better.

I liked "A Complete Unknown" only because I'm anti-Chalamet and it's thrilling to see an actor you dislike turn in a fantastic performance. I was tepid on "Last Days" when I watched it because I like Van Sant but don't care about Cobain, but in retrospect, that's a pretty good biopic. I remember liking "Bird" when I saw it but that was a long time ago.

I always forget that "Funny Girl" is technically a biopic, my brain thinks that the movie is just about Streisand herself. Maybe my brain is right! I love that movie.

haven't seen any of this recent rash of biopics and have no interest to. i also prefer documentaries and concert films but i guess those don't do the kinds of numbers that these biopics sometimes do?

i hate em because i'd rather listen to the music - a contemplative and spacious experience - instead of watching a biography that tries to locate the essence of the music in someone's life story. bios can be interesting sure but the music bios always try to hitch a plot with ups and downs to the brilliance of the music and i find that really false and wildly obnoxious for being so omnipresent. the only music-related films i really like are basically concert films.

I don't think music biopics suck on some level that's specific to the musicness, biopics in general are just a wretched genre* so why should them being about a musician change that?

* Yes you can list some exceptions, so can I, but consider: how many biopics do you think are good compared to literally any other genre?

Right--I think of something like A Beautiful Mind, which took out the best part of an interesting book: all the math.

a musician's life is never as big-screen interesting as one would think,

Same goes for writers. Queer worked b/c we hardly if ever saw William Burroughs writing.

biopics do tend towards being dire in general, music biopics seem to be particularly so due to how often they're brand management exercises

XP upthread to Unperson - You can grab Endless Waltz from Archive.org - the MKV file has English subs, and it is a decent rip.

https://archive.org/details/endless.-waltz.-1995

I came up with a list a few years ago:

1. Sid And Nancy (1986)
2. The Buddy Holly Story (1978)
3. Bound for Glory (1976)
4. Lady Sings the Blues (1972)
5. The Doors (1991)
6. Ray (2004)
7. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
8. Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)
9. 24 Hour Party People (2002)
10. Nowhere Boy (2009)
11. Velvet Goldmine (1998)
12. Sweet Dreams (1985)
13. Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1994)
14. Bird (1988)

Queer worked b/c we hardly if ever saw William Burroughs writing.

Naked Lunch, on the other hand...

He writes CIA reports! With the aid of Mugwump jism. I can relate.

Shirley Henderson

Very, very briefly confused her with Shirley Hemphill.

i have yet to dive into this but i hear from ilx's metal crew that the 3 hour long cannibal corpse documentary is worth a watch for fans. not a biopic obv.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPot3rP53o

that Motley Crue movie is a fun hatewatch, for sure. the wigs are especially terrible.
also i object to the fact that modern-day Vince didn’t get winded performing (or getting to the stage) even once!

Elvis: Haven't seen this but some friends say it's good because it goes for extravagant magic realism instead of trying to play it straight

― Throw It Down Binman (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, April 27, 2026 11:44 AM

the 1979 john carpenter "elvis" tv miniseries starring kurt russell is good. well, at least it has prominently featured pinball machines, which is good enough.

I mean, the best films have car crashes, or robots, or people in spandex leaping through the air, punching each other. Do you remember Eight Legged Freaks. Now that was a film. That was cinema. Giant spiders. Scarlett Johansson in an early role. A scene with a spider fighting a cat. Can you imagine a biopic of Duane Allman that has a scene where a spider fights a cat? No, not unless it leans heavily into the drug aspect.

no offense but after what happened the _last_ time they tried to make a duane allman biopic they had fucking better not ever try again

GG Allin is so boring

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

idk, i rather liked the dicksucking

ashley pomeroy's posts read like he's writing a column for the austin chronicle in the 1990s

you decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing

If you want some terrible hatewatching. Also includes a car crash

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gId_BrymXgA

(Anthony Michael Hall as Mutt Lange!)

ok you know who i wanna see a music biopic about? bob mcgrath in the 1960s. seriously. that dude rules.

has anybody seen that film about farinelli? i haven't, all i know is that IRCAM went to a lot of trouble to reproduce the supposedly unique vocal range of, like, a perfectly normal human voice. castrato mystique was fuckin' WILD.

omg i actually have seen that movie -- i went to see it by myself when i was studying in Colombia and to this day don't know a single other person who has seen it!

i was proud that i watched it in Spanish lol

I also saw Casino while I was there

xxpost Elvis Telecom you are as always speaking my language

i love every terrible VH1 biopic like my own family
- Def Leppard! Meatloaf! and the best of the best: The Temptations!!!!

I've heard some younger people pronouncing biopic to rhyme with myopic, and my first instinct is to believe that they are dead wrong.

But maybe they are right, since nobody says bye-oh-graph-ee.

But when people shorten biography, they don't say bye-aww.

So maybe everyone is correct.

many, many x-posts but just saw this…

There's a Japanese biopic of avant-garde saxophonist Kaoru Abe in which Keiji Haino plays himself; I'd love to watch it, but I've never been able to find a subtitled version streaming anywhere.

…and:
https://archive.org/details/endless.-waltz.-1995

This was Artimus Pyle in the Skynyrd movie.

― pplains

This was Artimus Pyle in the Skynyrd movie.

― pplains

No, you're thinking of Whiplash: The True Story of the Metalli — ok, even I can't go any further with that one.

Only two quotes offered on the SS:TTSOTLSPC movie:

https://i.ibb.co/20v9zN3D/Screen-Shot-2026-05-02-at-8-48-17-AM.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dffFZom1Mac

remember that Through the Never that was half a Metallica concert film and half would be 90s action movie?

There's a Japanese biopic of avant-garde saxophonist Kaoru Abe in which Keiji Haino plays himself; I'd love to watch it, but I've never been able to find a subtitled version streaming anywhere.

…and:
https://archive.org/details/endless.-waltz.-1995

― (⊙_⊙?) (original bgm)

damn if you're gonna make a film about kaoru abe it should be made by a pink film director for sure

thanks for this link, i went to look at the uploader's other video uploads and i didn't even know there were english subtitles for "to be done with the judgement of god", a++, would download again

but yeah i think of artists you could make good rock biopics about... like you _could_ make a good movie about the kinks, but a rock biopic about them would just be terrible. music biopics are a sort of genre film, and to be "good" it has to reject the trappings of the genre. it's like if all music documentaries were those kinds of documentaries where famous musicians who had nothing to do with the musician in question just talk about how great the musician in question is.

haha well, erp, now that I've read more of the thread, I see multiple people already leaped on the kaoru abe thing... a testament to what a great space this is imo!

I've heard some younger people pronouncing biopic to rhyme with myopic, and my first instinct is to believe that they are dead wrong

trust your first instinct!

you _could_ make a good movie about the kinks, but a rock biopic about them would just be terrible

otm x 1000

music biopics are a sort of genre film, and to be "good" it has to reject the trappings of the genre.

can you think of any examples of this?

Yeah I like the trappings, give me trappings please

I actually saw a Kinks story-of-the-Kinks jukebox musical, and it was pretty solid!

A Dave Davies biopic where he gets abducted by aliens and shit would be cool

a dave davies biopic based entirely on his tweets

no wait

a _cher_ biopic based entirely on _her_ tweets

my cousin's husband is Dave Davies in that musical and has been for years

Klaus Kinski's sole directing credit, 1989's Paganini, looks like it out-Russells Ken R himself but is sadly only on YouTube with Portugese subs

I actually saw this about 20 years ago … might have been on VHS … it was very Russell-esque but also Herzogian … a la My Best Fiend.

Honestly the best one is Some Kind of Monster

(no, you should not say this)
"What about a biopic about the recording of Yes's 90125, but with the cinematography and cast of (Beverly Hills) 90210?" Brandon Walsh as Trevor Rabin, Steve Sanders as Alan White, Dylan McKay as Chris Squire...
(hides)

Honestly the best one is Some Kind of Monster

don’t think any of the cast really had a strong handle on the material tbr

Well, it's not like it was called All Kinds of Monster.

It was great in the way it focused on the “boringness” as opposed to doing the tropes that are why we despise so many other music biopics

Even the way it did give in to the tropes, like ending it with their triumphant appearance on MTV Icon, gave way to an underwhelming So?

(Of course, this was a documentary, not a biopic.)

Is this a thread where we can also talk about how weird it is that some people are now saying "bi-OP-ic" instead of "BIO-pic"?

A Dave Davies biopic where he gets abducted by aliens and shit would be cool

This one kinda gets there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfvGRwhtdPQ

Oil City Confidential didn't go far enough mixing in old noir movie clips. I want to see the movie where Dr. Feelgood actually is a blue-collar crime gang that robs banks in between gigs.

xxp this is how I thought it was pronounced until I was corrected on here, only ever seen it written down as assumed it was like "myopic"

I'd only seen people complain about this online and had never heard it out loud until last week's SNL UK when Paddy Young said it (not, apparently, as a joke). Is this an English this?

My understanding has been that it's a young-person-on-the-internet thing — people seeing the word who have never heard it pronounced, and making the same "myopic" assumption mentioned above.

I'm not offended by it, it's just funny to me because it wouldn't have occurred to me to say it like that.

Is this a thread where we can also talk about how weird it is that

obviously not or someone would have done it already

someone did up above

thatsthejoke.gif but also

The biopic, or biographical picture

Oh, it was mentioned yesterday. Just missed it.

Biopia would be a good name for a podcast about biopics

Biopsy

On one of the streamers recently I clicked on what I thought was a Monkees doc but it turned out to be a biopic. A couple minutes in I thought "hmm, something's a little off with these guys."

It's interesting to compare Straight Outta Compton and Lords of Chaos, came out the same year, bunch of maladjusted kids rise from obscurity with the most extreme music ever heard, shock the establishment to its core, become the voice of a generation and within three years everything disintegrates amid clashing egos, violence, death, (attempted) murder, antisemitism and petty infighting.

The (Dre-produced) NWA movie suffers from too much mythologising: the boys all mean well, Dre never beat up Dee Barnes, everything bad happening to our heroes is conveniently blamed on misunderstandings, and Jerry Heller. After the credits roll, younger viewers who weren't there in the 80s are just left wondering why these lovable rogues were so misunderstood.

Lords of Chaos (without any of its subjects involved in the production) on the other hand goes full-on iconoclast, and ends up suffering from too little mythologising, so at the end of the movie you are no closer to understanding how these bickering scrawny local losers at the time spawned tens of thousands of worshiping artists/bands worldwide, unless you were already intimately familiar with the culture.

Surprisingly hard to strike the right balance.