My name is Elton Hercules John.
He's about to tell the audience he's an alcoholic, a cocaine
addict, a sex addict, a bulimic, and a shopaholic that
has problems with weed, prescription drugs, and anger
management.
It's a stunningly honest way to begin
a movie about a real person.
And knowing a movie is about a real person
can definitely add some dramatic weight to the proceedings.
At the same time, life doesn't necessarily
happen in the kinds of character arcs
that movie storytelling requires.
You're gonna have to give him a moment, son.
Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life
before he plays.
And that's a problem for biopics.
But before we get into it, why not
take a moment to subscribe to the Nerdstalgic channel?
The film industry has been making biopics almost as long
as it's been making films.
In just 18 seconds, Thomas Edison's 1895 short,
The Execution of Mary Stuart, is probably too brief
to qualify as the first one, but it still
goes to show how early on filmmakers
were using their medium to depict well-known people.
Ever since, then Hollywood has regularly
made movies about the lives and careers
of the rich, famous, infamous, or otherwise noteworthy.
The trappings of the genre have also
been used to create quasi biographical films,
like Gus Van Sant's Last Days and Orson Welles' Citizen
Kane, which reinvented cinematic language
and is very possibly the single most revered and influential
film of all time.
Biopics are also generally reliable at the box office.
The highest grossing recent examples,
which include movies like Bohemian Rhapsody, American
Sniper, The Greatest Showman, The King's Speech,
The Wolf of Wall Street, and Rocketman,
have sold billions of dollars in tickets.
And the genre has remained consistently popular
with audiences for decades.
But from a screenwriting perspective, biopics are hard.
Even picking a story structure can be tricky.
Filmmakers generally have a choice between two forms.
The first is what's sometimes called a snapshot bio.
Snapshot bios, like 2012's Lincoln,
cover a relatively narrow but presumably
definitive slice of the subject's life.
The alternative is the conventional biopic model.
Conventional biopics, like 2004's Ray,
take place over the course of decades and attempt
to mimic the ups and downs of a real person's entire life.
The snapshot model has the advantage
of being structured more like a regular movie.
It tells a singular story about an event that changes
its protagonist forever.
But to do so, it has to omit most of its subject's
experiences, so it doesn't give audiences the real scope
of that person's life.
On the other hand, the conventional model
covers decades.
That means it can capture everything,
but it comes with other problems, not least of which
is that a lot of them feel alike.
You've definitely seen this kind of movie.
We get a glimpse of an artist discovering their talent.
Often, when they're still a child,
we see them fight their way into the music business
and write their early hits.
They play now famous concerts and rise
to the top of the charts.
And along the way, they fall in love,
battle personal and professional demons,
and often slug it out with some form of addiction.
Here's one for all the sober people.
These beats underlie too many beloved biopics to count.
On the other hand, they're also at the heart of a lot of duds.
That's because not only does a movie that
takes the conventional path have to succeed in telling
the basic arc, it also has to somehow find
a way to add an original flavor and sense of genuine emotion
to that arc.
And in a world that's seen effective spoofs
of the genre like 2007's Walk Hard,
The Dewey Cox Story, and 2022's Weird, The Al Yankovic Story,
that ain't easy.
You're all just a bunch of normals, OK?
I'm the weird one!
I am the weird one!
So how does a biopic zoom far enough out
to see a person's whole life while still conveying
a meaningful, intimate, and original, feeling portrait
of a well-known person?
It's instructive to compare 2018's Freddie Mercury
biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, to 2019's Elton John
biopic, Rocketman.
Both movies introduce us to pre-fame versions
of their respective subjects that give us a look
at their relationships to their families.
Both eventually get discovered, write hit songs,
and conquer the rock and roll world.
These superficially similar flicks
were released within about six months of one another.
Bohemian Rhapsody made $900 million at the box office
and won four Academy Awards, while Rocketman
went on to make $200 million and scored one Academy Award.
So by those measures, it's hard to argue Bohemian Rhapsody did
anything wrong.
And due to a whole lot of behind the scenes drama we're not
going to get into here, Rocketman director Dexter
Fletcher wound up taking over directing duties
on Bohemian Rhapsody from original director Bryan Singer.
Fletcher directed what he estimates to be about a third
of the film, so even though he's not
credited as a director on the Queen pic,
he's definitely an author of both movies.
But while Rocketman was lauded by critics,
Bohemian Rhapsody drew mostly lukewarm reviews.
And in the years since its Oscar wins,
Bohemian Rhapsody has increasingly
become something of an internet punching bag
while Rocketman has only continued
to grow in reputation.
Rocketman just did a better job telling its rise,
fall redemption story.
This is greatly because the movie turned out
to be such a surprisingly frank character study, something that
was apparently done at the request of the rocker himself,
who on record saying, my life can't be sugarcoated,
and I didn't want it to be.
The warts and all approach showed
John's traumatic childhood.
When he didn't hug me.
Don't be soft.
Where he got his talent and drive from,
his failings as a young man, his triumphs
as a musician, his addictions and his love life,
and being more honest about its subject's low points,
the redemption at the end of the film
felt more earned, emotional, and meaningful.
In contrast, Bohemian Rhapsody has
been accused of cleaning up Mercury's life
to make for a more mainstream moviegoing experience.
The result is that we never feel like we know Freddie
as well as we know the Elton of Rocketman.
We never delve as deeply into his dark side.
So his redemption doesn't really emotionally register as much.
The movie ends up feeling like a flat, soulless highlights reel
of events from Freddie Mercury's life, albeit one scored
from some of the greatest rock songs in history.
Rocketman figured out how to stand out
from the conventional biopic pack.
It did this by being truly told from its main character's
perspective.
The relatively trippy production let Elton's view
of his own life shaped the movie in fantastical,
reality bending ways.
And John's flamboyant sense of style
is built right into its production design.
It's a brilliant use of visual storytelling
that helps to more deeply connect
the audience to the man.
By comparison, Bohemian Rhapsody is
as straightforward and realist as they come,
which isn't inherently bad, but doesn't do much
in a similar way of helping a film stand out either.
Rami Malek certainly resembles Mercury to some extent,
and the recreations of Queen's Live Aid performance
are nothing short of brilliant, but otherwise, the film
does little to use its visual style
to aid in the development of its main character.
Same goes for the use of music, where Bohemian Rhapsody, again,
opts for a very conventional approach.
Queen's music is mostly included diegetically
in rehearsals, concerts, and on the radio,
and it's often used in service of scenes
lazily enacting how those songs were written and recorded.
Rocketman's use of music, on the other hand,
is completely character driven.
The film is a jukebox musical that
repurposes Elton John's songs to help tell the story itself.
The rocker's most recognizable hits as sung by the cast
are woven right into the fabric of the tale.
When a 10-year-old Elton roars into "The Bitch is Back,"
it doesn't tell you much about the song,
but it tells you a ton about the character
of the kid singing it.
Despite using the conventional biopic formula,
Rocketman never feels formulaic because it
uses the unvarnished truth to make its arc land powerfully.
Bohemian Rhapsody, in contrast, barely
scratches the surface of Freddie Mercury,
and the ultimate effect is like watching the filmic equivalent
of a Wikipedia article.
One of the A&R men from EMI saw us recording,
gave our demo to John Reid.
He looks after Elton John.
But taking a step back from these specific movies,
we see biopics because we want the chance
to feel like we know the people who shaped our world.
And when done well, biographical films
can create an emotionally rich experience
that allows audiences a far deeper understanding
of a person's real life journey than any mere list of facts
could ever give them.
Being based on real life events doesn't invalidate
an audience's fundamental desire to see a story's protagonist
face significant conflicts, fail, grow,
and come out a changed person on the other side.
The complexity of real life has to be balanced
against the dramatic needs of a screenplay, while still
conveying a meaningful portrait of the real person
at the heart of the story.
It's like we said--
biopics are hard.
So what do you think?
What are some of your favorite biopics?
And what made them work for you?
Let us know down in the comments below.
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definitely find others you like if you check out
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