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Like millions of other people, I went to see Michael this week. I knew what I was getting into – most reviews have been brutal. It is a “whitewash”, “ghoulish”, a “127-minute trailer montage” of “cruise-ship entertainment”. And yet the film of Michael Jackson’s rise to global stardom has broken the record for the biggest opening in biopic history, and made $217m (£160m) worldwide on its first weekend of release, with over $900m projected by the end of its run.
So I found myself thinking: if we know these films are often sanitised pap, that the estates and lawyers have excised entire chapters of a musician’s life, why do we still go in droves? There’s the obvious explanation, of course. The biopics give audiences a way to experience a favourite artist at their peak and to dip into their much-loved musical catalogue.
But another part of it, I suspect, lies in our attitude to genius and our need to try to explain it.
We’ve always struggled to accept that extraordinary talent might simply exist, without a particular set of conditions giving rise to it. Since Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives nearly 2,000 years ago, the belief has persisted that if we study a great life closely enough, its secret might be uncovered. It’s what made the Romantics insist you couldn’t understand a poem without understanding the poet’s inner wounds. We cannot accept that talent simply arrives, unbidden, and unaccounted for.
We want to know where the music and the artistry came from. We want the childhood, the life-changing experiences that produced Thriller or Bohemian Rhapsody or Back to Black. Writing about Shakespeare, whose psychology has confounded observers for centuries, the poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability” – the ability to embrace “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts”. The irony is that Keats meant it as a description of why genius resists explanation. And yet it is precisely that resistance that pushes us to keep trying.
But while the biopic promises to solve the mystery, it surely never does. And in the case of Michael, so much of his life has been left out. The film stops in 1988, blanking altogether the child sexual abuse allegations that overshadowed the last decades of Jackson’s life and haunt his legacy. Jackson died denying the allegations. How can we interrogate a man’s life and his work while leaving out its darkest parts?
Attorneys for the Jackson estate, which served as a producer, realised there was a clause in a settlement with one of the singer’s accusers that barred the depiction or mention of him in any movie. As a result the third part of the film was scrapped and reshot. What remains is a series of gripping musical sequences, and an uncanny physical performance from Jaafar Jackson, but almost nothing of the man behind them.
Nonetheless, the film contained flickers of something more disturbing: Jackson’s obsession with Peter Pan, the architecture of Neverland, the suggestion of a man constructing a fantasy world to survive the real one. But the film offered no sense of his creative process, no confrontation with the contradictions that made him one of the most fascinating and troubling artistic figures of the 20th century. We see his bullying father, Joseph Jackson, as the villain. But what happens when Jackson becomes the moral conundrum? A life cannot be understood in halves.
Telling a selective version of a musician’s life is no problem for studio execs. For an industry increasingly reliant on pre-existing intellectual property, the music biopic is a near-perfect product: it offers a built-in fanbase, a ready-made soundtrack, easy nostalgia and cross-generational recognition. The turning point was 2018’s Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which was a commercial triumph – despite being widely criticised for glossing over the Queen frontman’s sexuality and Aids diagnosis. The lesson Hollywood drew was not that audiences want complexity, but that they will come regardless.
Since then, we’ve had biopics on Bob Dylan, Elvis, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, and Robbie Williams. Next comes Sam Mendes’s four separate Beatles films. Biopics on Joni Mitchell, Ronnie Spector and Janis Joplin are in the pipeline.
Musicians’ estates are also comfortable with telling particular parts of stories and not others. When Michael Jackson died in 2009, he was more than $500m in debt. Today his estate is worth $2bn, having been rebuilt through royalties, MJ the Musical, a Cirque du Soleil collaboration, merchandise, and now this film. This all serves hardcore fans and casual listeners too; many want to continue engaging with Jackson’s legacy untroubled by the allegations that mar it.
But when someone’s life is editorialised in this way, we all lose something. In his poem Beasts Bounding Through Time, Charles Bukowski reels off a list of damaged titans – among them Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath and Fyodor Dostoyevsky – and calls them “these punks, these cowards … these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light towards us”. Geniuses are fallible, and more than capable of doing serious wrong.
Perhaps Michael is a chance to accept what these authorised biopics cannot do. They are like blue plaques – they tell us someone lived here, but little more. If we want to truly understand what made these artists who they are, we’ll need something messier and much less comfortable. Something that might never get made into a blockbuster movie.
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Nadia Khomami is the arts and culture correspondent at the Guardian
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