The tricky business of music biopics

Along with films about real life authors, poets, comedians and artists, biographies of musicians are notoriously difficult to translate successfully to the cinema screen. Why?

Writing and painting aren’t inherently cinematic; live music has more visual potential (hence the greater number of motion pictures). But the challenges of lip-synching and the existence in most cases of plenty of original concert footage raise the stakes for any actor prepared to take on such a role. There’s a real danger of performances falling into pastiche and mimicry.

Directors face an even greater predicament when music rights are refused, as was the case with the recent Stardust (2021) where actor/musician Johnny Flynn had to come up with songs in the style of David Bowie. A challenge for any actor, one which unfortunately laid heavy on Flynn’s narrow shoulders.

Likewise, Anthony Hopkins’s Surviving Picasso (1996) boasted none of Pablo’s paintings and the same year’s Basquiat also featured no actual (as opposed to ersatz) works by the artist.