After two decades of irritatingly similar Music Biopics, the genre needs to begin to pull from the ideas of the artists that it wishes to represent. Head of Reviews Robert Flynn talks about A Complete Unknown and I’m Not There, two films that have successfully broken the pattern of derivative music biopics.
James Mangold, director of A Complete Unknown (2024), has had an especially interesting relationship to the conventional Hollywood musician biopic. His initial foray into the genre, Walk the Line (2005), proved to be a fruitful affair to all of these involved: unprecedented box office earnings, academy awards, and all. Despite how rudimentary Mangold’s Johnny Cash biopic can feel at times, it still maintains its reputation as a sturdy and handsomely made music biopic. It showcases some star-making performances while also demonstrating Mangold’s deft storytelling abilities, being able to guide an audience through much of Cash’s life without feeling as though the film has lost track of its own thread.
Many music biopics had come before Mangold, though very few had been as fine tuned and considerately crafted as Walk the Line - a film that was made accessible to even those who were unfamiliar with Cash’s discography through how the film searched for humility in Cash’s story, going beyond his hits and into his personal life (the film was adapted from Cash’s autobiography). In typical Hollywood fashion, the same magic had to be replicated. And thus, the modern music biopic was born anew.
Titles such as Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), Rocket Man (2019), and Back to Black (2024) have all been made with Walk the Line in mind. These often painfully formulaic biopics hit the same beats, feeling more focused on blasting the hits and exploiting a musician's personal life than paying tribute to an artist’s extensive milieu. Some efforts have fared better than others, Elvis (2022) namely, though most films feel more concerned with defying documented history and condensing an artist's life into a neat yet gaudy two hour biographical drama that seems completely unconcerned with what a musician truly stood for.
The prior two decades of music biopics were then the reason that many felt ambivalent about Mangold’s sophomore music biopic, last year’s A Complete Unknown. Instead of diving into the conventions that Mangold had himself created, A Complete Unknown did something that Bob Dylan himself would have done: it subverted expectations. Limiting the film’s timeline to a window of five years as opposed to a lifetime, A Complete Unknown avoided the fool’s errand of attempting to investigate one of music’s most enigmatic figures.
Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic gradually becomes more concerned with the figures that Dylan interacted with in the earliest point in his career (Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie) as well as his overall impact on the direction and definition of folk music throughout 60s America. By going against convention, A Complete Unknown became far more than an adaptation of a Wikipedia page - it became a thoughtful film about acknowledging the history of folk music while also realising the imperative of going against tradition when creating truly singular art.
A film that also offers its own interpretation of Dylan’s career, and one that Mangold was certainly pulling from, is Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007). Always an auteur, Haynes was never concerned with creating anything that would resemble a conventional biopic. His lofty, often abstract, film casts six different actors to play the role of Dylan - none of which are given the musician’s name. Haynes’s casting even transcends race and gender, with Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin playing different iterations of Dylan. It is a film that is entirely concerned with embodying the odd and inventive rhythms of a Bob Dylan song, meandering into various ballads and visual riffs. Haynes’s most ingenious decision, the casting of six Bob Dylans, pays homage to the universality of the folk musician's career as well as the unprecedented amount of dimensions and artistic re-inventions that he has explored throughout his illustrious career.
It is a film that unfortunately will never appeal to the masses, meaning that Hollywood will never consider it. However, Haynes’s film often does feel like the best version of a music biopic, without even attempting to aim for such a label. The structure of I’m Not There (2007) has no basis in typical Hollywood formula, leaving it open to completely commit to trying to adapt Bob Dylan’s sensibilities to a different artistic medium. While it can be difficult to imagine that such a film would ever be replicated within the studio system, A Complete Unknown (2024) demonstrated an intriguing balance between convention and innovation. While the history of the music biopic remains uncertain, Haynes and Mangold have managed to establish a platonic ideal: a totemic artist's contribution to their medium should certainly be considered through the lens of an ambitious, inventive art piece.