Biography

dir: Craig Brewer

2025

Look, I know how terrible this sounds on paper.

If you saw the poster, if you just heard the title, you might think it’s a cheesy biopic about Neil Diamond.

But wait, it’s not even that.

Song Sung Blue is a biopic about a cheesy Neil Diamond impersonator, and his eventual wife who sometimes impersonates Patsy Cline.

Huh. You could imagine people lining up around the block at their nearest multiplex for that one.

Hugh Jackman is great. Who doesn’t love Hugh Jackman?

He played the character of Wolverine / a guy who cuts people up with his metal claws in dozens of movies so often that, to overcompensate, he’s done a slew of other movies where he just sings. Singing is how he started off his career, playing the lead in The Boy from Oz, don’t you know, so it’s not something he only does when he’s drunk at karaoke like the rest of us.

So, yeah, his career is evenly split between cutting up people with his adamantium claws, and crooning to delightful crowds of basic bitches and general normies in flicks like Les Miserables, The Greatest Showman and Happy Feet, and then this flick here.

You might like Hugh Jackman, like I do, and you might like his singing, to which I am studiously indifferent. A lot of people loved him in Greatest Showman, like, a lot of people; I had friends, relatives and complete strangers telling me how much they loved that film.

And I’m still like: Okay. This flick isn’t necessarily going to make you a believer, but he plays it so, so well.

What I’m talking about, though, is the character that he’s playing, who was a real person, who was loved, who had his demons and still overcame them, who lived a life not of quiet desperation like the majority of us, but of out and loud determination to be a version of a star, who still yearned for the applause and the adulation, knowing full well that no-one would ever see him as anything more than an impersonator.

And his beloved Claire (Kate Hudson, who is so great in this). She, too is, like us, a total fucking nobody living a barely working class existence in suburban Milwaukee, who loves to sing too. She has no delusions of grandeur or greatness, and she is less a has been than a never was. But when she sings Patsy’s songs, she sings with her whole heart, and when she sings with Mike together on stage they are glorious, incandescent and fucking untouchable.

Even if what they’re singing is Neil Diamond songs.

dir: Richard Linklater

2025

I never would have thought one of my favourite movies of 2025 would be a biopic about some short-arsed shmuck I’d never heard of, though I do of course recognise some of the songs mentioned. And I also never thought I’d see Ethan Hawke play an actual character as opposed to the same Ethan Hawke character he seems to play in everything from Reality Bites to The Black Phone movies. It’s important to remember that much of Hawke’s best works have been with this same director over the decades, whether it’s the Before trilogy with Julie Delpy or the great elongated experiment Boyhood.

It’s really a transformative performance, as in, you regularly / occasionally forget it’s Ethan Hawke playing this dapper, motor-mouthed, whiney, irritating, charming, delightful jerk called Lorenz Hart.

That might not be a household name anymore, but the songwriting duo of Rodgers and Hart was a formidable one, up until it was eclipsed by the far more famous and successful Rodgers and Hammerstein, what with their Oklahoma!s and their Kings and I and their Sounds of Music and whatnot.

Rodgers was the music composer, Hart the lyricist, but considering the movie begins with Hart’s death, and then jumps back several months to the opening night of the premiere of Oklahoma! on stage, we can surmise that there’s been some falling out between the duo, resulting in Rodgers and Hammerstein hooking up (professionally speaking).

Hart bails from the premiere overflowing with resentment and mockery. For the entirety of the flick he refers to that successful musical as “Oklahoma Exclamation Point” to show his utter contempt for its cornpone pandering, but we start to get the idea that it’s less his critical, unbiased judgement, and more his wounded pride that’s talking. He can’t believe that Rodgers has “left” him for Hammerstein, but still hopes to coax him back, somehow.

dir: James Mangold

2024

Ah, musician biopics. For some viewers, these inhabit the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, reserved for traitors and people who pick their teeth in public.

This director previously scored big with Walk the Line, which was not only very successful, but set forth the template for all these loathsome biopics, whereby they have become parodies of themselves, and we keep lapping them up like the slavering Pavlovian dogs that we are.

Just before doing some important thing, let me think back on all the moments that brought me here. Let every song I ever wrote be inspired by something someone said, or something I saw on the way to the laundromat. Let everyone, especially my first wife, tell me I’ll never amount to nothin’ until I become the biggest star in the world. Let my inevitable descent into addiction be magically healed by the love of a good woman. And let there be a concert at the end where everyone, my true believers and my doubters, be united in celebrating the awesomeness that is me.

dir: Sam Taylor-Johnson

2024

I think biopics for musicians are some of the laziest flicks that ever get made, and they either end up becoming hits that are adored by audiences that garner their stars lots of shiny awards, or, like this one, almost universally derided travesties liked by no-one.

Because I decided that this was musician biopic week, I watched this and One Love over the course of two nights, one being about Amy Winehouse (obviously, I mean, that’s this one), and one about Bob Marley. Both came out around the same time, both were hated by critics, both made their money back, so at least on paper they weren’t failures.

And yet the critical consensus is that they were both pretty shit.

I don’t pretend my opinion means anything, or that it matters, compared to anyone else’s, if only measured against my other opinions. So when I say that I thought Back to Black was a much better film than One Love, I don’t pretend that it’s going to change anyone’s mind, or that it should. I just really felt that this flick captured a lot more of what made Amy who she was, even in a sensationalistic and somewhat superficial vehicle, than the other flick ever came close to.

And I say this unequivocally – both films probably have solid performances by two solid actors, but neither come close to even looking like the stars they are about. Marisa Abela doesn’t look like Amy, but then I don’t know that she has to for it to work. For me it felt like she embodied Amy in such a way that it gave us more of a sense of her energy beyond what she might have looked like (or sounded like, exactly).

I don’t come to this from the perspective of a fan, because I never bought one of her records, back when that was a thing. I knew of her when she was alive, and knew some of her bigger hits, but never cared that much when she was being savaged in the media for her perceived faults as a singer or a human being, and when she died I noted that she’d died at that terrible age of 27, like many a rock star of yesteryear.