Ahead of the release of All Eyez on Me, we round up some of the best biopics about musicians.
Control (2007)
Photographer-turned-director Anton Corbijn was perhaps the ideal man to make a film about Ian Curtis, the tortured lead singer of British band Joy Division, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 23.
His stark black-and-white cinematography perfectly echoes both the band’s carefully crafted aesthetic and Curtis’s bleak lyrics.
Newcomer Sam Riley took the role of Curtis, while Corbijn’s wife and Tony Wilson, the co-founder of the band’s record label, Factory Records, were the producers. New Order – the band that rose from the ashes of Joy Division following Curtis’s death – supplied the music, guaranteeing an unusually intimate relationship between the filmmakers and the subject of their movie. Corbijn had also worked with Joy Division as a photographer.
The movie won a host of awards, including the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Award and a Bafta for Matt Greenhalgh’s script.
Walk the Line (2005)
James Mangold’s film stars Joaquin Phoenix as country-music legend Johnny Cash, alongside Reese Witherspoon as his second wife, June Carter. Both were nominated for Oscars for their roles, with Witherspoon picking up the gong.
Unusually, although Cash died just two years before the film’s release, Mangold chose to focus only on the early stages of Cash’s life and career, ending the story when Carter agreed to marry him in 1968.
The film does not suffer for this, however, as evidenced by the armfuls of awards it picked up and an impressive US$186.4 million (Dh683m) box-office take – a record for a music biopic that would not be broken until Straight Out of Compton surpassed it in 2015.
The Doors (1991)
Val Kilmer pulled off a remarkably adept impression of The Doors frontman Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s film. It follows the singer from his Florida childhood through meeting his bandmates at UCLA in the mid-1960s and up to his mysterious death in Paris in 1971.
To be fair, the film isn’t the best rock biopic you will see – many of Morrison’s friends and family have refuted the film’s accuracy, while Stone, never shy to make a political statement, sometimes seems to be trying to shoehorn in such meaning where there probably was none.
However, it is still worth watching, if only for Kilmer’s impressive transformation into the leather-trousered Lizard King.
Sid and Nancy (1986)
Alex Cox’s classic tells the story of the last days of Sid Vicious and, by association, his band The Sex Pistols, following the punk rocker’s fateful meeting with professional groupie, drug addict and supposed love of his life, Nancy Spungen, in 1977.
Spungen’s exact role in Vicious’s decline into heroin addiction is still a matter of some debate, but a year after they met, both were dead – Spungen as a result of a stabbing believed to have been carried out by Vicious, though the trial never went to court as he died from a heroin overdose while on bail a few weeks later.
Gary Oldman took an early big-screen lead role as the snarling Vicious, while Chloe Webb played his doomed lover.
I’m Not There (2007)
When is a biopic not a biopic? When it's Todd Haynes's bizarre, non-linear, Bob Dylan-inspired I'm Not There.
The movie features six interconnecting stories, in each of which a different actor – or in one case actress (Cate Blanchett) – portrays a different facet of Dylan’s personality or era of his life.
Haynes assembled a heavyweight cast for his experimental film, with Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Marcus Carl Franklin and Ben Whishaw lining up alongside Blanchett as the other Dylans.
If it sounds hard going, do not worry. Despite the director’s unusual approach, the movie is highly watchable – and even gained the approval of the notoriously grouchy Dylan himself, who told Rolling Stone that the film was “all right”.
High praise indeed from the king of the grumpy old men.
cnewbould@thenational.ae
