From Freddie Mercury to Ray Charles – and now Amy Winehouse – Sean Wilson considers why filmmakers are drawn to the rise-and-fall stories of troubled musicians.
Cinema can distil an entire life into a couple of hours, following a three-act structure that mirrors birth, life and death. We understand this narrative compression on an atavistic level: it’s almost as if we’re witnessing our own human development playing out on fast-forward, with the dramatic parts foregrounded. As Alfred Hitchcock said, ‘Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.’
The same can be said of the new Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. Here, the filmmaker returns to the sensitive, character-driven focus of her teenage, pre-Beatles John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy (2009). In Back to Black, we’re presented with a full-blooded performance from Marisa Abela as Winehouse, the gifted, British contralto soul artist who died at 27. Winehouse’s short life was defined by a complex mixture of meteoric artistic success and tragedy that prematurely cut her life short. Although the film is infused with a sense of sadness – informed as it is by her struggles with bulimia and drugs – it’s also magnanimous enough to recognise the influence of Winehouse’s musical legacy.
Back to Black (2024)
Back to Black belongs to a longstanding tradition of films that have mythologised tragic pop stars, ranging from dramatised biopics to documentaries. Winehouse has herself received a molecular level of examination in Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning 2015 doc Amy, which resists the use of glib talking heads. Instead, there’s a carefully interwoven tapestry of archival footage and audio, whether it’s the candid and jubilant sight of Winehouse recording her hit single ‘Back to Black’, later to headline the Grammy-winning album of the same name, or the shocking material tracing her physical decline prior to her death. The footage is recognisable and yet, by virtue of its archival nature, distanced. By refusing to give in to reductive readings of Winehouse’s life in which we’re told what to think and feel, the film asserts a haunting power as an intensely subjective experience.
If Amy utilises the documentary format to suggest the enigmatic, complex nature of its subject, then dramatised biopics routinely draw their fascination from a mixture of character flaws and raw talent. They also lend themselves to dramatically explicable triumph over adversity arcs that aim to maximise commercial appeal.
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) is one such biopic that tapped into our desire to see pop-culture heroes deified. It depicts the rise and tragic fall of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, played by Rami Malek. It stages itself around recognisable musical set-pieces and digestible segments of Mercury lore, beginning with his early days (when he went by his birth name Farrokh Bulsara), which includes his meeting with drummer Roger Taylor and guitarist Brian May, then of the band Smile.
When Mercury, Taylor and May are eventually christened Queen, the film trots out the audience-pleasing construction of hits like ‘We Will Rock You’, culminating in the group’s seminal 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley. The film scrambles the chronology of its subject’s life, placing Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis before Live Aid as if to suggest that knowledge of the tragedy spurred on his iconic stadium performance. Regardless of the liberties taken, there was no denying the resulting effect on audiences: Bohemian Rhapsody took more than $900 million at the global box office and won Malek a Best Actor Oscar.
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
Evidently, the rise-and-fall music-biopic formula is a winning one, even when it plays fast and loose with the facts as Bohemian Rhapsody does. The Ray Charles biopic Ray (2004), starring Jamie Foxx in the title role, similarly takes this approach. Like Bohemian Rhapsody, the film traces a rags-to-riches narrative that speaks to a mass audience’s desire for wish fulfilment, beginning with Charles’ childhood poverty, the onset of his blindness at the age of seven, and his emergence on the ‘Chitlin Circuit’, recording venues embraced as a safe haven by African-American artists.
By the time we’re presented with the adult Ray Charles recording the classic blues standard ‘Mess Around’ – defying his blindness with the sheer energy of his output – the word ‘reverential’ barely covers it. Foxx so eerily assimilates Charles’ piano-playing style, again rolled out in set-piece reenactments of gospel hits such as ‘I Got a Woman’, that it’s hard to imagine the film offering any kind of pointed critique of its subject, even when Charles yields to drug addiction. Like Bohemian Rhapsody, the approach paid off in an artistic sense with an Oscar win for Foxx, vindication again for rousing cinematic hero worship.
Ray (2004)
Very often, these films are at their most interesting when they break with convention and subvert any sense of simplistic adoration. Todd Haynes’ controversial Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) reimagines the last 17 years of the anorexic Karen Carpenter’s life using Barbie dolls, suggesting that the very nature of tragedy is mutable in its presentation. The film’s cult reputation was all but guaranteed when, in 1990, Haynes was compelled to withdraw it from circulation after losing a lawsuit to Carpenter’s brother Richard.
In much the same vein, aesthetic reinvention fuels Control (2007), Anton Corbijn’s take on the truncated life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, who died at 27. Corbijn intentionally strips Curtis’ life of vibrancy by rendering it in monochrome, allowing Sam Riley’s superb central performance to resonate in greater layers of melancholy as Curtis’ legacy is posthumously channelled into the spirit of follow-up group New Order.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)
Sofia Coppola’s atmospheric drama Priscilla (2023) could also be seen to break the rules, since it offers a less than sympathetic depiction of Elvis Presley (which, notably, was not sanctioned by his estate), The King of Rock and Roll is routinely mythologised on film, so it’s a bracing shock to discover Jacob Elordi’s depiction of a brutish, controlling Elvis opposite Cailee Spaeny’s Priscilla Presley. Coppola’s film deconstructs the hagiographical material surrounding the Presleys’ marriage and their famous Graceland home, refracting their lives through Elvis’ emotional (and sometimes physical) abuse. This is especially noteworthy in the film’s powerful closing stages when Priscilla walks away from the drug-addled Elvis while he’s at the height of his fame. It reframes the longstanding narrative of sanctimonious Elvis worship, and instead grants the agency to Priscilla herself.
Priscilla (2023)
Usually, such films are compelled to walk the line and honour their subjects with awed reverence, especially when their surviving relatives are involved. Sticking with Elvis Presley, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022) features an Oscar-nominated performance from Austin Butler that is the dramatic antithesis of Jacob Elordi’s portrayal in Priscilla. Luhrmann’s film acts as a sweeping and celebratory summation of Presley’s life, starting with his infatuation with African-American music in his Tennessee youth, and speeding right the way through to his troubled Vegas residency years before his death at 42.
Elvis (2022)
The narrative is ultimately framed as an archetypal hero/villain battle between Elvis and his manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), and, as if the film’s reverential credentials weren’t apparent enough, it closes with an end card – a biopic favourite – reiterating Presley’s status as the bestselling solo musician in the history of music. As stated in John Ford’s classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): ‘When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.’
From Bohemian Rhapsody to Elvis, Amy to Back to Black, cinema’s unique sense of time dilation is well-configured to the needs of the tragic pop star biopic, lending itself to a contradictory mixture of heightened, operatic triumph and existential finality. Time and again, such films honour the cultural imprint of our musical heroes, while lamenting their absence. By coming to terms with these movies, and the people they depict, we also come to terms with our own fallibility, an experience that is, by turns, humbling, moving and oddly empowering. Be they adulatory or critical, the sheer range of these films highlights one thing above all: the details of each subject’s life are singular, but the nature of tragedy, as relayed by cinema, is universal and irrefutable.
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