The Problem With Music Biopics

Any biographical movie—”biopic,” in the popular shorthand—has one question it must answer about its subject well before the cameras start rolling: Why do we care about this person? Biopics of musicians, especially beloved ones, don’t usually have to work very hard to answer this. Anyone with a pulse will hear “Lively Up Yourself” or “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “Cold Sweat” or “Somebody to Love,” and will probably be more than game to spend a couple hours with the people who made them. In fact, one reason that so many musician biopics are so disappointing is that they rarely bother to provide more than a puddle-shallow narrative whose function is to get the film’s soundtrack from one crowd-pleasing needle drop to the next.