i love shitty music movies

a defense of the useless musician biopic

Hollywood is perishing, and its death rattle sounds like the tales of septuagenarian rock stars. 

Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra and all four of The Beatles will soon be given the biopic treatment, fresh on the heels of similar projects about Amy Winehouse, Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, and (of course) Elvis. And that’s just in the scripted, feature-length realm; the average smart-TV owner is about four clicks away from a recently-released, 90-minute retrospective on ABBA, Cyndi Lauper, Celine Dion, De La Soul and The Beach Boys. As in-theater audiences dwindle and streaming services prove impossible to monetize, music movies seem to be one of the few templates that risk-averse studios are willing to bet on. They’re the new superhero movies, in many ways — known quantities, tepid and predictable, dressed up with the faux-importance of a $60 boxed-CD set. Most of them suck, and even the great ones fall into hacky, Dewey Cox tropes every 15 minutes or so. Their quality exists on a spectrum from “Oscar bait” to “hamfisted PR ploy,” in an industry already gasping for original storytelling and experimentation, they hog the spotlight with cookie-cutter plot beats and bland celebrity worship.  

And yet. Nothing is more soothing to me than one of these mid-range music movies. They’re as lightweight and predictable as a Harlequin romance novel, as inoffensive as a History Channel special (you know, before the channel pivoted toward the whole aliens-and-Hitler thing). They’re a go-to source entertainment when my brain is too tired to feel or discover much of anything. Yes, I say, hitting play on some brightly-colored HBO tile and rubbing my little raccoon paws together, give me the montage of family photos! Give me the tired-sounding parent saying just how much this boy loved his guitar, how much this girl loved her tape machine, how much those siblings loved their church choir! Give me the Johnny B. Goode sound cue and the boilerplate generational analysis! Give me the collage of newspaper headlines, the grainy home movies, the interpretive animation that’s supposed to represent heroin addiction! I want to be guided through this career while learning as little as possible, to be utterly unsurprised by yet another iteration of a star’s rise and fall! I can’t get enough!

I realize that I’m conflating two genres here: the musician biopic and the music documentary. To my mind, they are two sides of the same coin. Both are presented with an impossible task; to translate the charm of one art form into another, to make a story feel like a song and vice versa. As a result, the music movie is at cross-purposes with itself: it can never seem to decide if it wants the audience to understand a musical life or to experience it. It comes by this incoherence very honestly. After all, what art form could be more at odds with the primal scene of rock music — the young man alone, screaming for someone to love him — than the slow-moving warship that is a Hollywood production, smeared with the fingerprints of one thousand exhausted, sweaty overachievers? 

Walter Pater said that all art aspires toward the condition of music, implying that most of these art forms fail to unify subject and form, to graze the sublime. Few things drive that point home more clearly than the flimsiness of the music movie. Any insistence on narrative looks useless and nerdy compared with a simple I-V-vi-IV chord progression and a pretty face. Forced into a three-act structure and managed by a cadre of IP lawyers and estate handlers, the voices of a generation are rendered tinny and faint, if not downright ridiculous. These movies feature performances so earnest they verge on camp, cringeworthy soundbites and overly glossy cinematography. They feel like movies made for people who’ve never seen a movie before, and seem to assume that the audience has never heard a song before, either. 

Still. Every month or so, when the schedule is free and the living room couch is open, they’re the only thing I’m interested in. There’s something comforting about the unoriginality, the utter ease of prediction. It’s nice to remember that even the most extraordinary lives can be distilled into a clean rise-rise-fall structure; that the most skillful attempts to depict a zeitgeist will come out plastic and corny; and that even the most extraordinary lives will be reduced to pixelated footage and compressed sound. 

These aren’t stories of individual artists as much as they are reifications of a myth – that of the singular icon, the genius, the rock star. Talking about them sometimes feels like sitting around a campfire, whispering about the ghosts hiding in the woods. Did you hear the one about the brothers who almost killed each other? The woman who gave away her baby? The one who died? The one who fame couldn’t kill?

These movies are best enjoyed when they are seen not as definitive accounts or high art, but as tributes, charming in their imperfection. Their foolish attempts to capture lightning in a bottle only serve to show the untameable power of the lightning itself — call that musical genius, creative vision or plain old charisma. In the end, perhaps the allure lies not in their artistic merit, but in their function as modern mythology. They’re a catechism in fame and celebrity, a warm bath in the American imaginary.

But there’s one more thing that keeps me coming back. Amid all the clumsy exposition and baffling dialogue, there tends to be a single, transcendent moment when the artifice falls away. This can be an unbelievable bit of archival tape, a transcendent bit of acting, or a sequence of visuals that somehow just fucking gets it. For an instant, the subject is snapped into clear view, the dichotomy of form is dissolved, and the audience glimpses the power of the music on display and the raw humanity of those who created it. I think of a 19-year-old John Cale staring straight at the audience; of an anxious Paul McCartney cracking the verse of “Get Back” while the cameras roll; of a sweaty and fat-suited Austin Butler seeming to exit his human form as the film dissolves into footage of the real-life, waning Elvis. These moments are intense; they are fleeting; they tend to make me cry. Everything around them is repetitive and dull, and as a result, they shine all the brighter.

It’s these instances of brilliance that keep me coming back, hoping to catch another whiff of elusive magic. The moments are worth the price of admission. Come to think of it, the hope might be, too.

thank you for reading :) I got kind of locked up in my writing practice over the last few weeks and just wanted to get something out there and break the little cage of anxiety I’d built up around myself. hope you enjoyed 💖 Kylie