The music biopic is a notoriously difficult cinematic genre to nail. For every acclaimed portrayal of a legend there’s a dozen tone deaf misrepresentations that fall way short of the mark. To be fair, using one medium to capture the magic of another isn’t an easy task. The in-the-moment excitement of a live concert is incredibly hard to translate on screen (Baz Luhrmann did an excellent job in 2022’s otherwise fanciful Elvis), and the pitfalls of cliché are everywhere. Indeed, the moment Val Kilmer and co. pull a fully formed Light My Fire out of thin air in Oliver Stone’s ponderous Doors film should have been enough to warn any film-maker off ever trying to depict the art of songwriting.
A compelling and believable central performance is key (honourable mentions to Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning turn as Ray Charles in Ray and Andy Serkis’s Ian Dury in 2010’s Sex & Drugs & Rock And Roll). And while superfans might baulk at any liberties taken with the slightest of details (yes, we all know that the “Judas” heckle happened at Bob Dylan’s concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in May 1966, not at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 as shown in A Complete Unknown), films such as Gus Van Sant’s not-quite-Kurt Cobain character study in 2005’s Last Days show that an unconventional approach to the subject matter can sometimes uncover a truth more effectively than a more run of the mill rags to riches story. Let’s not forget that these are movies after all, not documentaries. Baring all of that in mind, MOJO have selected what we believe are 10 of the best examples of a music biopic done right…
10.
Bohemian Rhapsody
(Brian Singer, 2018)
As larger than life as its subject.
Everything about this biopic threatened disaster – a central character of inimitable charisma; a history of script and casting snafus; the replacement of director Singer with Dexter Fletcher – and 20th Century Fox’s stinginess with screenings set off alarms. Then the critics panned it. But like Queen themselves, Bohemian Rhapsody proved critic-proof. This was all about Rami Malek’s Oscar-winning performance as Mercury – mischief, melancholy and madness glisten in those Gollum eyes – the seductive power of the set-pieces, plus the pacing and delivery of the tunes. Against which the crap wigs and plot liberties are, ultimately, bagatelles.
Best Bit: The electrifying first seconds, as the viewer is led onstage at Live Aid, sets the tone.
9.
The Buddy Holly Story
(Steve Rash, 1979)
The jukebox wore glasses.
Gary Busey, who’d attempted to portray Buddy Holly before but had to settle for the role of Crickets’ drummer Jerry Allison in a cancelled production, proved a ringer for the bespectacled rocker from Lubbock, gaining an Oscar nomination in the process. Nothing was lip-synched, the music was recorded live, and the feel of the whole film benefited as a result, creating not only that rare thing - a genuinely fine rock movie, but also a template for a long-running stage musical that would set the standard for jukebox musicals set to flourish in its wake.
Best bit: The Rave On jam at the Apollo, Harlem.
8.
Bound For Glory
(Hal Ashby, 1976)
Three chords and the truth. And some chronological slippage.
The early years of Woody Guthrie, with David Carradine perfect as the train-hoppin’, slow-talkin’ father of protest song. Haskell Wexler’s photography, accurately mirroring the drought-ridden years of the Depression, won him an Oscar nomination, while the lax chronology – allowing the use of all of Guthrie’s best-known songs, many of which were written at a later period than that depicted in the film: a precedent built on by Bohemian Rhapsody – feels more than forgiveable. Odetta, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, The Weavers, Country Joe McDonald and Guthrie himself also contribute to a high-quality soundtrack.
Best Bit: The awesome approach of the life-draining dust storm.
7.
The Hours And The Times
(Christopher Münch, 1991)
Lennon: in his own right.
The mistake many music biopics make is to concentrate on the music. Replicating a landmark concert or, worse still, the creation of a classic song, almost always results in disappointment and cliché. The genius of Münch’s black-and-white character study is the way it inhabits the quiet sad edges. A fictionalized account of the Beatle’s Barcelona weekend with Brian Epstein in 1963 uses John Lennon’s downtime to zone in on his fears, flaws and insecurities. Ian Hart has never been better, in a role he’d reprise in 1994’s inferior Backbeat, and the film conveys more in pauses and glances than Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy does in 90 minutes of stodgy biog.
Best bit: Lennon and an air stewardess dance to Little Richard’s I’m in Love Again in their hotel room.
6.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
(Todd Haynes, 1987)
Plastic fantastic!
For this 1987 student film, Todd Haynes cast Barbara Millicent Roberts as the Carpenters’ singer, songwriter and drummer. Roberts, aka Mattel “dressing-up” doll, Barbie, is used by Haynes as a symbol of both the American feminine ideal and the anorexia Carpenter battled with throughout her life. Moving between meticulous puppet shows, and hysterical montages of post-war America (Vietnam, Watergate, etc.), the film becomes a nightmare of oppressed womanhood, Barbie’s always-smiling plastic face whittled away by Haynes as Carpenter grows ever sicker. Withdrawn from circulation in 1990 following a lawsuit from Karen’s brother Richard, suitably degraded copies can still be found online.
Best bit: A medical documentary about the false “highs” of anorexia, fades into The Carpenters singing Top Of The World, accompanied by grotesque snippets of ’60s food adverts.
5.
Walk The Line
(James Mangold, 2005)
The man in black celluloid.
How many disbelievers stayed to the end of the credits just to confirm that Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon really did deliver those vocals in this tale of John R. Cash, country music’s most distinctive (and self-destructive) superstar and June Carter, the onstage fire-cracker love of his ever-complex, pill-popping life. It follows the trail from Sun Records, through Cash’s earlier marriage to Vivian Liberto and the unlikely triumph at Folsom Prison, concluding with that true-to-life onstage proposal. Both Phoenix and Witherspoon figured among the film’s five Oscar nominations, with Witherspoon deservedly winning the Best Female Actor award.
Best bit: Cash kicking out the lights at the Opry in 1965.
4.
A Complete Unknown
(James Mangold, 2025)
Are friends electric?
With Walk The Line, director James Mangold perfected the traditional rise, fall and resurrection rock biopic narrative (a trope skewered by 2007 pastiche Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), but by using Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric as the frame in which to tell the story, A Complete Unknown is all rise. And thanks in part to Mangold massaging a few facts here and there, it’s a thrillingly breakneck one. Timothée Chalamet is fittingly electrifying as Dylan, capturing not only his hunger and intelligence, but impish sense of humour. However, it’s as an ensemble piece that the film really sparkles: loose-cannon Cash, green-eyed Albert Grossman and in particular Edward Norton’s note-perfect Pete Seeger, whose heartbreak at Dylan’s perceived betrayal is gut-wrenching.
Best Bit: Newport ’65. We know the moment Dylan goes electric is coming, but the tension leading up to it and the wreckage it leaves in its wake still manages to floor you.
3.
Love & Mercy
(Bill Pohlad, 2014)
The man with two Brians.
Pohlad’s masterly Brian Wilson biopic leaves you divided on purpose. The scenes where a bright-eyed Paul Dano plays the brilliant if fragile “Brian-Past” glow with authentic ’60s west coast sunlight, while the specific moments in which he creates Pet Sounds in the studio, are, without a doubt, the only truly convincing “making-of” sequences in the history of the music biopic. Yet, the “Brian-Future” segments, in which John Cusack plays ’80s Wilson with chilly disengagement, appear dormant, inert, vacant. Of course, it’s intentional: Brian’s future is a prisoner of Brian’s past. Watched again, a good film starts to approach perfection.
Best bit: Brian in the United Western Recorders asking Chuck Berghofer “Hey, do you think we could get a horse in here?”
2.
Control
(Anton Corbijn, 2007)
The rise and fall of Ian Curtis in beautiful black and white.
Director Corbijn’s note-perfect feel for the aesthetics of Joy Division, which he had helped define as a photographer nearly 30 years before, could have been predicted, but the tautness of the storytelling and Sam Riley’s uncanny and magnetic central performance as Ian Curtis came as thrilling shocks. That bane of the rock biopic – the failure of recreated gigs to live up to the legend – is also haughtily dispatched: the Something Else performance of Transmission is spine-tingling, the more so as Corbijn cuts to Samantha Morton as Deborah Curtis, watching in growing wonder and disquiet at home.
Best Bit: Riley/Curtis heads to work at the employment exchange, to the strains of JD’s No Love Lost. In white on the back of his donkey jacket: the word HATE.
1.
Coal Miner’s Daughter
(Michael Apted, 1980)
Forget Mötley Crü, this is the real dirt.
If one thing obscures the complete brilliance of Apted’s Loretta Lynn biopic, it’s Sissy Spacek. Picked for the role by Ms Lynn herself, the 30-year-old brings a feral beauty and windblown strength to her portrayal of the teenage Kentucky-born country-singer. It’s a performance that can easily overshadow the film’s other strengths, but from the rusted Kentucky landscapes, to the cast’s careworn Dorothea Lange faces (including The Band’s Levon Helm as Lynn’s father), this is a biopic that exhales coal-dust authenticity and sparkles with rhinestone melancholy. It influenced a wealth of formulaic rags-to-riches music biopics, but don’t hold that against it.
Best bit: Lynn and her husband Doo (a terrifying Tommy Lee Jones) fighting in a car-park in front of Patsy Cline.