The rock biopic never goes away. Its popularity waxes and wanes, and not everyone will agree on what the great ones are. Just look at the love-it-or-thumb-your-nose-at-it phenomenon that was “Bohemian Rhapsody” — or at Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” which seems, thus far, to be a movie that audiences have embraced more than critics have. What we can all agree on, perhaps, is how much we cherish this form. When it’s great, the rock biopic delivers a kick of excitement that’s singular in its grandeur. These movies are all about art, they’re about fame, they’re about sex and drugs, they’re about conducting the electricity of rock, soul, funk, punk and hip-hop, they’re about an actor not just playing but becoming a pop star, and in that sense they’re about music as save-your-soul, walk-on-the-wild-side, stairway-to-heaven religion. Here are the 10 rock biopics we think are most worthy of worship.
Control
In 1980, Ian Curtis, the 23-year-old lead singer of Joy Division, took his own life. His suicide then cast its shadow back over the band, sealing their image as morose prophets of postpunk doom. But Anton Corbijn’s exquisitely accomplished Curtis biopic both mythologizes and undercuts the image of Curtis as the depressive bard of the Manchester music scene. Sam Riley, who looks eerily like Curtis, is mesmerizing in the concert sequences, flinging his arms around in the singer’s trademark martial strut, which was like a stylized version of one of his epileptic fits (a condition he addressed in “She’s Lost Control,” arguably Joy Division’s most arresting song). Shot in lusciously austere black-and-white, “Control” is about another sort of division — the split that Curtis felt between the normality of his home life and the temptations of rock stardom, a conflict that tore him apart.
The Buddy Holly Story
Gary Busey, still mostly an unknown, dropped 35 pounds and did his own singing to play Buddy Holly, the grinning, horn-rimmed Boy Scout of 1950s rock. There are rock biopics that have the gregarious spirit of B-movies, and this is one of them, though it may be the supreme example of how a certain upbeat drive-in-movie geniality can be perfectly attuned to its subject — in this case, Busey’s Buddy Holly as a rock dynamo in a nerd’s body, turning songs like “Peggy Sue” and “Not Fade Away” into crackling anthems of happy combustion. The entire movie is a pedestal for Busey’s rambunctious performance, which is all about Holly channeling the spirit of early rock as something larger than himself.
Notorious
A luridly liberating trip through the violence and hunger, the verbal brilliance and money fever of the hip-hop world, which George Tillman Jr.’s drama views as both heroic and destructive (often for the same reasons). Dressed in pin stripes and a bowler hat, Jamal Woolard is uncanny as the imperious-on-the-outside, haunted-on-the-inside Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G., who saunters arounds like a mountainous gangsta John Wayne, imposing himself on each encounter. He starts off as a crook, then becomes a put-on crook who’s reborn into a rap superhero, making up his smoky dark rhymes on the spot, using the words to seduce. But the movie also teases out the glee in Biggie (he’s like a kid cracking up at his own bravado), which is one reason it’s a far richer, subtler, and more potent hip-hop chronicle than “Straight Outta Compton.”
Backbeat
It may seem that the Beatles are too iconic to be convincingly portrayed in a biopic. Yet Iain Softley’s drama is a loving reenactment of the years before the Beatles got famous, when they were just a rough-and-tumble bar band hired to keep the customers awake between strippers by playing hard-rocking cover versions of “Be-Bop-a-Lula” in the grimy rathskellers of Hamburg. And so the movie lets us discover them anew. Ian Hart, a dead ringer for John Lennon, makes him the nastiest and wittiest punk around. Everything but rock ‘n’ roll is a sham to John, yet his hostile japery is itself a mask. We can see that his true musical comrade is Paul McCartney (Gary Bakewell), yet the one John feels closest to is Stu Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff, in his finest performance), the fifth member of the Beatles, who is sexy, aristocratic, and doomed. The movie is about how the Beatles learned to unite rock ‘n’ roll with beauty, and when they finally do, taking the stage to play “Twist and Shout,” it gives you a shudder.
Love & Mercy
It brings off a time-machine miracle. For much of Bill Pohlad’s film, we’re in the studio with Brian Wilson, the damaged prodigy of the Beach Boys, as he creates “Pet Sounds,” and damned if we’re not right there with him — watching him work out his musical arrangements with the Wrecking Crew, or teach his brothers how to sing in contrapuntal harmony, holding the masterpiece he’s making together in his own head. Paul Dano, spacey and spooked, catches the delicate directness of Brian’s lust for the sublime, and the movie shows a deep understanding of how Wilson’s mental-health issues (this is a man who hears voices) are inextricable from his creative virtuosity (this is a man who hears voices). In the film’s other half, John Cusack portrays Wilson 20 years later, when he’d become a wreck under the exploitative “care” of the hustler guru Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), and the story of how Wilson freed himself from this Dr. Feel-Bad becomes as emotionally suspenseful as it is moving.
Ray
Jamie Foxx channels Ray Charles in a movie that pays galvanizing tribute to his genius but also digs down into his flawed, soul-deep humanity. The director, Taylor Hackford, creates a supple storytelling structure, allowing Foxx to uses Ray’s blindness as a fulcrum for the singer’s laser-like ability to read people. The movie stays true to Charles’ story, but it’s built like a runaway train to rhythm-and-blues heaven, so that by the time Ray performs “What’d I Say,” he seems to be ascending into a percolating nirvana of electric-piano propulsion. Yet Ray’s triumph is also his downfall. He becomes successful by controlling everything — his music, his business, his master tapes, the women and drugs whose temptations he can’t resist. He becomes a dynamo of unchecked ego, even as he forges a sound as large as America.
I'm Not There
When you hear about Todd Haynes’s visionary biopic-in-six-parts, with half a dozen actors playing Bob Dylan in different guises, it may sound like an overreaching academic stunt. But Haynes is the most down-to-earth deconstructionist alive. He treats each segment as a little movie of its own, and he’s so rapturously attuned to the dirty secret of Dylan’s music — that it was never “folk,” and that the lyrics don’t matter nearly as much as you think — that the movie works as a series of bedazzled epiphanies, whether it’s Cate Blanchett embodying the druggy hipster Dylan of 1965 as a sun-glassed celebrity enigma, or Heath Ledger touching the raw nerve of his marital troubles, or Christian Bale singing the 1980 gospel song “Pressing On” in a way that unlocks the passion of Dylan’s Christian phase. These ever-changing Dylans are as distinct as can be, even as they flow right into one another. What unifies the movie is Todd Haynes’ addiction to Dylan. He wants to lure you inside that intoxication, and does, which is why “I’m Not There” plays like the headiest musical ever made.
What's Love Got to Do With It
The saga of Tina Turner has become a myth, a legend, a parable. But when this biopic was released in 1993, the story of her marriage to Ike Turner — the extraordinary music they made together, the horrific abuse she suffered — was still being unpacked, and in the movie it plays with a force of revelation. Angela Bassett does full justice to the volcanic power of Tina’s stage persona in the 1960s, when the intensity of her singing and dancing trumped every pop performer around. Offstage, she shows us how Tina was trapped in a relationship of merciless fear. Yet Laurence Fishburne’s performance as the manipulative, two-faced Ike is never a caricature; it’s a portrait of toxic domestic male rage that’s rendered as humanely as the film renders Tina’s anguished heroism. “What’s Love Got to Do With It” retains a singular power: as a cautionary tale of unchecked abuse, and as the story of an artist who, even as she hid in the shadows, remade the pop-music landscape with the fury of her gift.
Get on Up
Amazingly, there are still many Chadwick Boseman fans who have never seen the late actor’s finest performance — as James Brown, in all his raspy cunning and whirling funk ecstasy. How does anyone play James Brown? How do you inhabit those moves, that gruffer-than-life personality? You have to be operating on some next level of majestic exhibitionism, but damned if Boseman doesn’t bring it off. Tate Taylor’s movie has a vibrant authenticity — it stays extraordinarily close to the saga of how Brown created his own inside-out version of rock ‘n’ roll, flipping the backbeat, accompanying it all with stage moves that would mark him as a one-man machine of transcendence. Yet the Brown we see is also a scalded soul, at once proud and merciless. With every performance, he’s stomping out his pain, and Boseman is uncompromising when it comes to portraying how Brown shut out the world in order to conquer it.
Sid and Nancy
It was Gary Oldman’s first movie (no one, until then, had heard of him). Yet he inhabited the role of Sid Vicious with such astonishing immersion — the scowling grin and pasty skin; the glassy-eyed delinquent-as-sociopath daze; the way he tossed his body around like an S&M rag doll — that to this day it may be his single greatest performance. In a timeless punk drama, the director Alex Cox did something indelible in its transgressive glee. He made what was essentially a Sex Pistols biopic by building it entirely around Sid, a charismatic wastrel of almost no talent, and his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen, played by Chloe Webb as a platinum-blonde junkie vampire who speaks in a screeching whine from hell. These people were thought of, even by many of their closest associates, as a joke. Yet the tawdry glory of the movie is that it digs so deep into their humanity, their dirty-syringe desperation, and their genuine love for each other that it’s like watching “Tristan und Isolde” in safety pins and torn fishnets. Sid, as he once sang, did it “My Way,” and in the movie’s culminating scenes, set in the Chelsea Hotel, Oldman and Webb create a darkly spellbinding magic together, making the pain as real as the self-destructive insanity. With the exception of “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Sid and Nancy” is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll movie ever made. And that makes it the greatest rock biopic.
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