{"id":254530,"date":"2025-10-27T12:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T12:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/254530\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T12:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T12:31:09","slug":"in-defense-of-a-much-maligned-movie-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/254530\/","title":{"rendered":"In defense of a much-maligned movie genre."},"content":{"rendered":"

This article is part of Portrait Mode<\/a>, a Slate pop-up series about biopics.<\/p>\n

What if I told you that there\u2019s a movie in theaters right now directed by one of America\u2019s greatest working filmmakers starring an actor he\u2019s worked with many times, giving a revelatory performance of the sort we\u2019ve never seen him deliver before? Would that sound exciting?<\/p>\n

What if I told you it was a biopic? Does that word dim the excitement a little, maybe a lot?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s undoubtedly because the word biopic immediately brings to mind clich\u00e9-filled cradle-to-grave stories and not, say, a film exploring a life by depicting just a few hours of it, like Richard Linklater\u2019s Blue Moon<\/a>, a first-rate biopic \u2026 err \u2026 biographical drama, in which Ethan Hawke plays the ill-fated lyricist Lorenz Hart.<\/p>\n

How toxic has the word biopic become? To disavow the word is now a clich\u00e9 almost as predictable as, say, a flashback to childhood trauma to explain adult behavior. \u201cThis movie is \u2026 not a biopic<\/a>,\u201d director Marielle Heller told Entertainment Weekly while offering a preview of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, her film starring Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers. \u201cNot a biopic<\/a>\u201d is also how Ana de Armas described Blonde, her 2022 movie about Marilyn Monroe. At a 2023 event at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Oppenheimer writer-director Christopher Nolan rejected the term completely, even offering other genres\u2014specifically the heist movie and the courtroom drama\u2014that he felt more aptly described his movie. The biopic, he said, \u201cis not a useful genre<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

By this logic, it\u2019s almost easier to define the genre in negative. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is not a biopic because it focuses on the relationship between Esquire writer Lloyd Vogel and Fred Rogers (played by Matthew Rhys and Tom Hanks, respectively). Blonde is not a biopic because it depicts Monroe\u2019s life through the lens of Joyce Carol Oates\u2019 highly fictionalized 2000 novel of the same name. Oppenheimer is not a biopic because Nolan finds the tendency of \u201cbiography post-Freud to attribute characteristics of the person you\u2019re dealing with to their genetics from their parents.\u201d But while each of these movies takes a different approach, they all also attempt to portray the story of the life of a real person. What everyone really seems to be saying is that their projects aren\u2019t biopics because biopics are bad.<\/p>\n

The history of biographical films has often supported this, and even the good ones have inspired distrust in their accuracy. For an example, look no further than Blue Moon\u2019s predecessor, 1948\u2019s Words and Music, an earlier attempt to depict the life of Hart (Mickey Rooney) and his partnership with composer Richard Rodgers (Tom Drake), released five years after Hart\u2019s death. The product of MGM\u2019s famed Freed Unit, the film takes the form of a musical revue, letting its story give way to elaborate stagings of Rodgers and Hart songs performed by the studio\u2019s biggest stars. These alone make the movie worth watching, but the film\u2019s cleaned-up version of Hart\u2019s life doesn\u2019t make sense even within the film\u2019s sanitized world. The film makes him a cigar-chomping imp prone to fits of melancholy because he just can\u2019t find the right girl, only hinting at his alcoholism and other self-destructive habits, all while depicting him as enthusiastically heterosexual. The choices are both historically inaccurate and dramatically nonsensical.<\/p>\n

In this, Words and Music was hardly an outlier. Night and Day, released two years earlier, makes similar omissions in the life of Cole Porter, for instance. 1941\u2019s They Died With Their Boots On refashions George Custer into a hero worthy of its star, Errol Flynn. The Babe Ruth Story depicts the hard-living baseball hero as a bighearted, overgrown kid whose talents included the ability to heal sick children via athletic feats. And so on. A desire to valorize their subjects while coloring within the lines of the production code created the expectation that biopics weren\u2019t to be trusted, no matter how entertaining they might be.<\/p>\n

The production code may have gone away, but the tradition never really died. It\u2019s not hard to connect the dots between a golden-age tendency to glorify biopic subjects and, say, Bohemian Rhapsody<\/a>, a biopic of the band Queen that doesn\u2019t pave over the tensions within the group but does repackage Freddie Mercury\u2019s all-too-brief life as a feel-good story. That Bohemian Rhapsody was produced with the involvement of the band\u2019s surviving members and doubles as a promotional film for Queen\u2019s music is certainly no coincidence. Such licensed products\u2014it\u2019s difficult to make a music biopic if you don\u2019t have the rights to use the music\u2014have contributed to the biopic\u2019s dubious reputation. That O\u2019Shea Jackson Jr. plays his father, Ice Cube, in the perfectly good NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton<\/a> (a film for which Cube and fellow NWA member Dr. Dre served as producers) suggests there\u2019s a ceiling as to how unsparing the depiction will be, and sure enough it was swiftly criticized for omitting Dre\u2019s history of abusing women<\/a>. The light touch that the mostly dreadful Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black<\/a> uses in depicting some of Winehouse\u2019s family members and others in her orbit may help explain how the film got made, but it obscures any insights the film might offer about Winehouse\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Carl Wilson
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<\/a><\/p>\n

But dismissing the biopic because of its worst examples (and Back to Black is at least in that conversation) is akin to dismissing the Western after watching a sleepy cowboy story on cable or dismissing horror movies after seeing the trailer for Amityville in Space<\/a>. It means narrowing the definition to exclude every movie that doesn\u2019t match a narrow, unflattering notion of what a biopic has to be and excluding examples that might improve the biopic\u2019s reputation on technicalities. An attempt to define the genre while removing The Pride of the Yankees<\/a> or Lawrence of Arabia<\/a> or Raging Bull<\/a> or Amadeus<\/a> or, with apologies to Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer quickly starts to feel absurd. Whatever else they might be, are they not also biographical pictures?<\/p>\n

Which isn\u2019t to say that biopics haven\u2019t provided reasons to be wary over the years. Though most directly inspired by Ray<\/a> and Walk the Line<\/a>, the brilliant 2007 satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story<\/a>\u2014directed by Jake Kasdan, co-written by Kasdan and Judd Apatow\u2014draws on decades of music biopic clich\u00e9s to tell the story of a doofus rock legend as he thinks about his entire life before taking the stage for what will prove to be his final concert. The film\u2019s so razor sharp in its satire it seems as if it should have put some of those clich\u00e9s to rest. And yet they\u2019ve persisted. I\u2019m pretty sure when the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect reached the appropriate moment, I whispered to myself, \u201cGoddammit, this is a dark fucking period<\/a>!\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Yet maybe even some of these clich\u00e9s exist for a reason. And maybe, when done right, they still work. With apologies again to Nolan, it\u2019s possible that Freud might have been at least partly right about the relationship between children and parents. The pretty good new Bruce Springsteen biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere breaks convention by focusing on a tight period in its subject\u2019s life, the months Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) spent living in a rented house composing and recording his stripped-back 1982 album Nebraska. But writer-director Scott Cooper also uses flashbacks to Springsteen\u2019s childhood depicting his difficult relationship with his mentally ill father Douglas (Stephen Graham) to draw direct lines between the album\u2019s themes and Springsteen\u2019s own mental health struggles. Is it a familiar biopic device? Sure. (At least, in Springsteen\u2019s case, the wrong kid didn\u2019t die<\/a>.) But it also rings true\u2014and just try not being moved by the film\u2019s final scene between father and son.<\/p>\n

Made with its subject\u2019s cooperation, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere might at heart be another example of a legacy act issuing a licensed product, albeit a better one than most. But if even the least-respected corner of the genre\u2014the artist-approved music biopic\u2014can produce a decent movie, isn\u2019t that reason enough not to write off the biopic? It\u2019s not as if movies about notable lives will stop being made, so why not opt for a big-tent definition that allows for a wider variety of films, from a solid by-the-book effort like King Richard<\/a> to a gleefully anachronistic experiment like Marie Antoinette<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some will be great, some mediocre, and some downright laughable, but that\u2019s true of any genre. They\u2019ll all be biopics.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article is part of Portrait Mode, a Slate pop-up series about biopics. What if I told you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[45709,88,206,138192],"class_list":{"0":"post-254530","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-biopics","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-portrait-mode"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}