James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, would seem to mark a return to an era of serious-minded films about serious-minded musicians, psychological character studies rather than jukebox-inflected, semi-fantasist extravaganzas. (Scott Cooper’s upcoming Deliver Me From Nowhere, about Bruce Springsteen, looks to continue the trend.)
In honor of its release this past week, it’s worth looking back at the films that have led us here. The following is a list of the seven best music biopics ever released.
7. Walk the Line (2005)
Mangold’s earlier music biopic was the prototypical 21st-century example of the genre. Walk the Line, the birth-to-death story of Johnny Cash (played by the Oscar-nominated Joaquin Phoenix), was memorably parodied in Jake Kasdan’s spectacular 2007 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (“Dewey Cox has to think about his whole life before he plays…”), and it’s easy to see why.
Walk the Line has a time-jumping, playing-the-hits structure that just makes sense for this kind of movie. The 2010s to 2020s run of second-rate musician bio-dramas (Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Stardust, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody) tried vainly to replicate this movie’s old-Hollywood appeal but failed to capture what made Walk the Line so captivating when it premiered in 2005.
6. I’m Not There (2007)
A conventional biopic cannot contain Bob Dylan, an enigma whose current film biography, courtesy of Mangold, correctly but somewhat evasively characterizes him as “a complete unknown.” Better to look at this utterly strange jigsaw puzzle, constructed by co-screenwriters Oren Moverman and Todd Haynes and directed by the latter.
Six actors play six different aspects of Dylan, none of them named Bob Dylan. Some of them (like Marcus Carl Franklin’s 11-year-old Black troubadour calling himself Woody Guthrie) resemble the singer/songwriter only in superficial, artistic ways. Others, like the singer characters played by Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale, are closer fits. They have one thing in common — to see them properly, as with certain virtuoso paintings, you have to step back and see all the brushstrokes arrayed side by side.
5. Love & Mercy (2015)
The second of Oren Moverman’s screenplays to make the cut here (this one co-written by Michael Alan Lerner), Love & Mercy is an innovative film biography that fittingly assigns two vastly different eras of the life of the Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson to two different actors.
The Batman‘s Riddler, Paul Dano, delicate and intense, is Wilson in the era of Pet Sounds, the 1966 album that cemented his legacy as a genius. John Cusack, heavy-footed and doleful, is Wilson in his forties, lost at sea and under the influence of a pill-pushing psychologist (Paul Giamatti). The performances are stellar, but it’s the immortal music that grabs and keeps you.
4. The Pianist (2002)
Famed Polish Jewish composer and pianist Władysław Szpilman was 28 and a star on Polish radio when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Rounded up, along with his family, into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, he was subsequently separated from them and survived for five years, hidden in attics and secret apartments in occupied Warsaw.
His survival ultimately depended upon entertaining a Wermacht captain (Thomas Kretschmann) with a penchant for Chopin. The Brutalist‘s Adrien Brody won the Best Actor Oscar for his wrenching, body-transforming turn as Szpilman in this harrowing watch with adulation for incongruously elegant, lilting music at its core.
3. Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021)
Jonathan Larson, the martyr-hero of the musical theater world, was 35 when he died of an aortic dissection on the night of the first Off-Broadway preview of his masterpiece Rent in 1996. His cause of bringing musicals to the masses was later taken up by successor Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose notably assured 2021 debut feature film adapted Larson’s earlier autobiographical musical, Tick, Tick… Boom!.
The film covers Larson’s abortive attempt to complete a musical based on Orwell’s 1984 and unwittingly foreshadows Larson’s abbreviated life in covering the story of his best friend (Robin de Jesús) being stricken with AIDS. The chief highlight of the film is Andrew Garfield’s Academy Award-nominated performance as Larson, which is loose-limbed and charming.
2. Maestro (2023)
Suffused with the balance of exquisite reality and high-flown fantasy that is itself the hallmark of great music, Bradley Cooper’s biopic of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, Maestro, is in every sense an improvement on his A Star is Born retread of 2018.
Anchored by well-matched performances by Cooper himself as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as his wife Felicia, the film is more a portrait of the sexual dynamics of their marriage than a story about his music, per se; nonetheless, Cooper directs a bravura sequence of Bernstein conducting in the Ely Cathedral in England that perfectly captures Bernstein’s charisma on the podium. The film is very possibly a modern masterpiece and deserves another look after being shut out at last year’s Oscars.
1. Amadeus (1984)
In its own way, the central relationship in Amadeus, between the divinely inspired but insipidly crude Wolfgang Mozart (Tom Hulce) and the haughty but mediocre Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for his role), is as paradigmatic as Romeo and Juliet, King Arthur and Lancelot, the black hat and the white hat.
Its portrayal of insane jealousy motivated by grudging regard reveals something fundamental about musicians and composers – the gift for music is a tactile skill bound by one’s own physical limitations, all the more infuriating because it can rise to such supernatural heights in a few lucky, gifted geniuses.
