With each passing year, it becomes harder to deny that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Jake Kasdan’s 2007 cult comedy about a fictitious rocker’s rise and drug-addled fall, might be the most prescient Hollywood film of the 21st century.
Borrowing liberally from the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line the film skewers rock biopic cliches as mercilessly as Airplane! lampooned disaster movie tropes. Its hero, Dewey (John C Reilly) blames himself for his brother’s death, ascends to fame, falls for a singer who isn’t his wife, rubs shoulders with the Beatles, descends into drugs, goes to rehab, gets clean, and – by the film’s end – makes a triumphant return to the stage.
Though it bombed on release, Walk Hard feels more potent each year, pre-emptively ridiculing the endlessly proliferating music biopics that walk straight-faced into the cliches it mocked. (“Haven’t these people seen Walk Hard?” critics reflexively ask.) Lately, the genre seems to be in full bloom: Back to Black, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s profile of Amy Winehouse, is hitting UK cinemas this week, with a cloud of controversy swirling around its portrayal of the late star’s troubled life. Now comes news that The Bear star Jeremy Allen White will fit his chiseled abs into Bruce Springsteen’s white tees for a film about the making of his album Nebraska.
Meanwhile, in February this year, Sam Mendes announced that he’s at work on a Beatles biopic. Except it’s not just one biopic; Mendes plans to direct four feature-length films – one from each Beatle’s point of view – all for release in 2027. Even the most devout Beatles obsessives have strained to consider this a good idea.
It’s time to admit: we’ve reached Peak Music Biopic. Let’s give it a rest. With the exception of Maestro (which, despite its flaws, surely reflects Bradley Cooper’s vision and artistry), these movies feel less like auteur-driven cinema than estate-sanctioned exercises in brand management, with their easy, IP-adjacent appeal juiced by access to renowned songbooks. Just as Heaven’s Gate now epitomises the hubris of the New Hollywood era, this quadrupedal Beatles project may come to symbolise the indulgent excess of today’s musical biopics.
Rock biopics weren’t always a sure bet for Hollywood. Thirty-plus years ago, Great Balls of Fire! and The Doors underperformed at the box office and yielded mixed reviews. But in the mid-2000s, Ray and Walk the Line proved that a good biopic could transcend its formula, attract a multigenerational audience and win Oscars. (Cynically speaking, both films were also aided by the then-recent deaths of their subjects, though both were sturdily made and well-acted despite their boilerplate arcs.)
That one-two punch ushered in the new age of rock biopics, and set the template for Walk Hard to skewer: young rocker rises from poverty, becomes a sensation, falls into drugs and temptation. “We tried to kill the musical biopic with this movie,” Reilly later reflected. “It turns out it’s a very resilient cliche.”
Resilient indeed. The genre only proliferated. Some specimens were more interesting than others: Todd Haynes eschewed the usual cliches with his 2007 biopic-as-collage I’m Not There, a deliberately obfuscating portrait of the deliberately obfuscating Bob Dylan.
Alas, the recent crop of biopics has been far worse. Bohemian Rhapsody squandered an impressive Rami Malek performance by egregiously rearranging the facts of Freddie Mercury’s life (no, he wasn’t diagnosed with HIV before Live Aid). Rocketman leaned on cornball fantasy sequences and whimsical flourishes to disguise what is, at core, a formulaic Elton John biopic. Its messy hybrid of jukebox musical and biopic also muddles up the chronology of John’s career.
And yet these movies remain profitable. This year’s Bob Marley: One Love is a fitfully interesting, overly reverent portrait of the reggae singer that struggles to articulate Marley’s political consciousness beyond a feelgood haze of pot smoke and peace platitudes, but it was a box-office success. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, an overwrought, razzle-dazzle fever dream, narrated by Tom Hanks sounding like a Southern-fried Werner Herzog, took in $288m in 2022.
Interestingly, that film’s sanitised narrative – obscuring the fact that Priscilla Presley was a minor when Elvis romanced her – created an opening for Sofia Coppola to make a far more complex film centred around Priscilla herself.
The glut of biopics feels emblematic of an era in which we refuse to let dead celebrities remain dead. Any deceased star is just waiting to be reanimated for posthumous profit. Consider the morbid spectacle of the hologram tour, which has turned 3D avatars of Frank Zappa, Whitney Houston and others into undead attractions. Artificial intelligence promises more grotesque resurrections. A meditation app recently released a bedtime story “narrated” by an AI-generated Jimmy Stewart voice, while George Carlin’s estate sued a podcast that claimed to have used AI to mimic the comedian’s voice and standup style.
The irony is that the best music movies of the past decade aren’t really biopics at all. They’re fictitious character studies, like the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a mordant, richly detailed portrait of a 1960s folksinger struggling to make it, or Tár, Todd Field’s hypnotic examination of a world-renowned conductor’s unravelling. Like Walk Hard, these films crackle with verve and imagination, depict actual milieux, and make their titular heroes seem as real as Dylan or Leonard Bernstein.
But because they aren’t rooted in familiar stories and pre-existing back catalogues, such movies tend to make studios nervous. They’re riskier than a Marley biopic, or a Springsteen one, or a Winehouse one. They’re works of the imagination, a resource Hollywood should focus on cultivating. As John Lennon famously said, “With meditation, there’s no limit to what we can … imagine.”
Oh wait, that’s just a Walk Hard quote.
• Zach Schonfeld is a freelance journalist and critic
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