I Watched 51 Music Movies. Here’s What I Learned.
I’m working on a script about a fictional pop star. It’s my attempt at writing a different kind of music movie, as I’m sick of pop music being the punching bag for movies about rock and country. Though I’m familiar with most of the music movie clichés, I wanted a more nuanced understanding than the stock tropes we all already know and make fun of on a regular basis. So to find said nuance, I ended up watching a grand total of fifty one music related films. Seventeen documentaries, seventeen biopics, and seventeen miscellaneous music creation movies.
Why fifty one, and why seventeen of each? Honestly, it was my own anal retentiveness. It was originally going to be forty five movies, a similar amount to the romantic comedies I watched for a previous project. However, I kept thinking of movies that were so popular at a certain time that I couldn’t really justify not watching them to myself. Movies like Ray and the newest version of A Star is Born.
Also, I was looking at these movies in their respective lists on a word doc, and my brain didn’t like the number of movies not matching in all three categories. So I added one movie to one list, then I had to add to the others to balance them out, and that’s how we got to fifty one. It was a fucking nightmare.
Of these movies, I’ve seen the majority of the biopics and the music making movies and half of the documentaries before. The point wasn’t to find out whether I like these movies, but to look at them from a new angle and try to find out what works for me or what does’t. What have music movies done before, and what new ideas could I bring to the table?
As you can imagine, I learned an awful lot. So let’s get to it.
The Movies
Documentaries
Amy
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Cobain: Montage of Heck
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
20 Feet From Stardom
Madonna: Truth or Dare
Dig!
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Marley
Gaga: Five Foot Two
A Band Called Death
The Punk Singer
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco
Shut Up and Sing
Original Cast Album: Company
Dont Look Back
Note: It’s actually spelled without the apostrophe. Fucks me up every time.
Biopics/Biopic Adjacent
Love & Mercy
Dreamgirls
Cadillac Records
Control
La Vie En Rose
Coal Miner’s Daughter
What’s Love Got to Do with It
Ray
Sid & Nancy
Walk the Line
Straight Outta Compton
24 Hour Party People
Selena
Lady Sings the Blues
The Doors
Shine
The Runaways
Movies About Making/Appreciating Music
Once
Begin Again
Sing Street
Inside Llewyn Davis
Whiplash
Crazy Heart
Almost Famous
Frank
Get Him to the Greek
Perfect Blue
Vox Lux
A Star is Born
Her Smell
Beyond the Lights
Ricki and the Flash
We Are the Best!
School of Rock
SPOILERS BELOW!
The cliché nature of biopics is just as much of a style problem as it is a screenwriting one.
Mention biopics, let alone music biopics, in certain screenwriting circles and you’ve committed a social faux pas on par with farting or public masturbation. They’re formulaic, they’re bound (to a certain degree) by fact, and because they often require a minimal amount of creative effort on the writer’s part, they’re a hotbed for a certain kind of hackery. To some writers, they’re a scourge. A very popular scourge at the moment, but a scourge nonetheless.
Personally, I think we have worse creative problems in the screenwriting world. But I understand the sentiment. There’s a certain kind of uninspired insipidness in a cliché biopic that you don’t really feel in other genres, and the more biopics eat up space on the Black List, the more that feeling can bleed into other aspects of the industry. (There were less biopics on the 2019 Black List than usual, but still.)
That said, no genre produces disposable scripts or movies as a rule. I’ve seen many corny biopics and read many cliché biopics, but I’ve seen and read many I liked as well. One such example is a movie I watched for the first time back in high school. The 2007 biopic Control, about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis.
I held Control as the antidote to prestige biopics. One that doesn’t fall into the traps that would be parodied in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. However, when I watched it again for this project, I realized that if you actually break the story down to its beats, it’s actually fairly standard stuff. It’s still great, and there are plenty of aberrations in the formula. But the formula is present. The rise, the fall, the love interest who suffers the brunt of the artist’s behavior, a medical issue to overcome, and so on and so forth.
I began to wonder why I thought it went so hard against the grain. The answer is simple. It’s got style.
Unlike most music biopics, it eschews a brighter color palette and flashy camera movement for a muted black and white look. It doesn’t have any flashy montages or stylistic flairs. There’s no emphasis on nailing every period specific detail, no showings of mass wealth, and there’s no attempt at conveying a sense of grand scope. It’s cool and angsty, just like Joy Division themselves.
Of course, we can chalk some of that up to the script and the actual details of Ian Curtis’s life. We don’t see any examples of mass wealth because Ian Curtis never had any, and while most biopics convey scope through travel and touring, we spend most of Control in grimy English suburbs. There is also, of course, the tragic circumstances of Ian Curtis’s death hovering over the story. Most music biopics have a happy ending. Control doesn’t.
However, when you combine all these style choices, you get atmosphere. (Har har.) When I look at the biopics from the set of movies I watched, the ones that stand out either break from traditional structure or traditional style. Preferably both. It’s not that they don’t any cliché biopic trappings. It’s that they don’t feel like cliché biopics.
Love & Mercy not only breaks linearity and has two actors playing the same character in two different parts in Brian Wilson’s life, but it also dips its toes into surreality in its style choices and uses different looks in its two timelines. La Vie En Rose makes similar choices to a sadder but equal effect. 24 Hour Party People, a movie we’ll be discussing in greater length later, not only breaks the fourth wall and outright tells is that it’s making certain things up, but also deploys a handheld documentary style for most of its runtime, as well as eschewing traditional dialogue for a more grounded comedic style.
It’s not just about the story you tell. It’s how you tell it. Breaking traditional biopic script structure is great, provided that what you’re doing works. But sometimes, that’s not enough.
A lot of songs written by fictional characters don’t sound like they were written by the characters, but for them.
Let us now consider “Shallow” from A Star Is Born, a song you’ve assuredly never heard before.
In a vacuum, it’s a perfectly fine song. The lyrics are fine. The production is fine. The mix is fine. Everything is fine. You can put it on, and for its three and a half minute duration, you can listen to it and provide yourself with yet another distraction from your impending death.
But let’s consider the context in which it was made: A fictional creation of two fictional characters in vastly different stages in their life. The song’s fictional writers are Ally, the young aspiring artist who’s seen little of the world and Jackson, a country star climbing down from the apex of his career, suffering from hearing loss and substance abuse issues. (The actual credited writers are Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, and Anthony Rossomando.)
To me, the song doesn’t really sound like it was written by either Ally or Jackson. The lyrics meant to sound worldweary and reflective, the Jackson half so to speak, aren’t particularly insightful or penetrating and the lyrics we see Ally come up sound like she’s trying to write like Jackson.
“Shallow” has to function in a narrative. Therefore, unlike songs written by actual artists, it can’t just exist for its own sake. The lyrics have to be pliable enough to function in two separate character arcs, both on an emotional level and a literal one as well. That’s why, to me at least, we get lyrics that point in the direction of meaning without actually providing any. The lyrics aren’t allowed to be specific because if you went into detail about what “And, in the bad times, I fear myself" is actually referring to, it runs the risk or no longer applying to either Ally or Jackson.
“Shallow” acts like what a lot of people think evocative songs are supposed to sound like. But without specificity or personal details, it loses an element that could, to me, make a song actually meaningful. The element of personal expression. That feeling that only this artist can write this song or perform it in this manner. There are, of course, other metrics we could use to measure a song’s greatness. But music is art, art is expression, and it’s nice to be reminded every now and again that a song was written by a tangible human being and not a focus group or a formula.
This is a problem present in a lot of movies that feature fictional songwriters. I have a similar issue with “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart, as well as certain songs in the John Carney filmography. Since the filmmakers or the producers want the song to be successful outside of the context of the movie, or at least work on its own merits outside of the context it was written for, these songs lose a sense of artistic identity. They don’t sound like songs written by specific people. They just sound like something resembling a song.
That isn’t to say that these are bad songs. I don’t particularly care for “Shallow” on its own merits, but I don’t bear any ill will towards it either, and I can say the same for “The Weary Kind.” There are even some songs that work specifically because they’re a little rote. The pop songs from Vox Lux and Perfect Blue, for example, both comment on the cold nature of the music industry and artist objectification by playing it straight. In Vox Lux, after having watched pop star Celeste on the brink of a personal implosion for most of the movie’s runtime, we watch all her problems temporarily melt away as she performs some pretty spot on late 2010s pop bangers. In Perfect Blue, an animated horror movie about toxic fandom, we’re treated to some incredibly catchy J-Pop.
Similarly, all the songs in Sing Street sound like they were written by a bunch of kids copying what they see on TV and hear on the radio because that’s the exact context of the movie. And, of course, there’s outright parody, great examples of which can be found in the Get Him to the Greek soundtrack.
However, there’s no beating movie songs that manage to convey that sense of expression. Some of the songs from Her Smell, for example, as well as some of the later songs in Sing Street. However, one of my favorite songs from any of the movies I watched was “Hate the Sport” from We Are The Best!.
Now, yes, I’m cheating here. We only watch the creation of snippets of the song, and we never hear it in its entirety. But it sounds like it was written by angry middle school girls, and it captures the nuances. The specific target of the lyrics. The lack of restraint. The dabbling into political issues without actually understanding them. It’s great, and it feels realer to me than “Shallow” ever will.
I wish more music documentaries portrayed the artistic process.
The artistic process, regardless of medium or genre, is intensely personal. Artistic creation requires a certain degree of vulnerability and emotional clarity, and it can require the exploration of dark alienating ideas and a space where an artist can feel safe to express whatever they need to express. It’s a frequently isolating experience that often leaves people at their worst.
Fragility is hard, so of course a lot artists find that talking about their process is difficult. It’s one thing to discuss it. It’s another to allow a documentarian to film it, and it’s entirely understandable why artists or documentaries don’t show the specificities.
Still, I wish more artists were willing to open up about it, and I wish more documentaries would show artists actually creating their art.
Part of the reason why is, of course, selfishness. As I said, I’m working on a project about a fictional pop star, and it would be nice to see certain parts of that process play out in real time. The writing and recording of songs. Making decisions and making changes.
And I’m happy to report that some music docs actually do show some of the process! In Amy, we watch Winehouse lay down some vocals that show up on Back to Black. In Shut Up and Sing, we watch various aspects of the recording process, including a notes session with Rick Rubin, embedded below. In Metallica: Some Kind of Monster we see… just about everything. (More on this doc later.)
Part of this also has to do with the fact that it would be nice if more music documentaries did more than just tell the story of the artist. (More on that later as well.) And while we’re here, we might as well get a few more obvious points out of the way. Watching someone write lyrics isn’t particularly cinematic, a lot of music documentaries are made after the subject has passed and thus the scope of many music documentaries are limited, and I’m sure we can think of a few more.
All that said, I find the music creation process genuinely interesting. I’m a movie guy, and thus I can say that I have at least a passing familiarity with the creation of narrative films. But other than writing lyrics, I can’t tell you shit about how music is made. I simply don’t know how to express myself through that medium, and while I understand how others can and do, it would be nice to have some more concrete examples.
Moreover, for people who aren’t artistically inclined, I think it could be valuable to see how it’s made not just on a granular level, but on a larger scale as well. That ideas come from an artist’s reaction to how they feel stimuli, and there’s no definitive, “Here’s where I get my ideas” bank. I think it’s important for people to understand that art is hard work, and it’s not just something you can do whenever you feel like it. It’s important to remind people that artists are actual human beings.
It’s easy to appreciate a song you love. You’d appreciate it even more if you saw all the hard work that went into making it.
Accuracy isn’t as important as verisimilitude.
Of all the fictional films I watched in my set, my favorite one, or at least one of my favorite ones, is the 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, a movie that covers the Manchester music scene from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Specifically, it covers the rise and fall of Manchester post-punk (Joy Division and all that) to the birth of UK rave culture. (24 Hour Party People and Control actually cover some of the same ground, but in entirely different ways. More on that in a future article some day.)
There were a lot of larger-than-life personalities surrounding this movement and this period of music. Tony Wilson (the actual subject of what is technically the biopic), Ian Curtis, Martin Hannett, the Ryder brothers, John the Postman, and so much more. There were also a lot of drugs, partying, and stupidity. As a result, the movie has a fitting irreverent tone. Of course, it has its share of sadness. Ian Curtis’s suicide does play a big role in the plot and part of the point of the story is how Factory Records couldn’t sustain itself because of all the drugs and partying. But at its core, 24 Hour Party People is a comedy. A dark comedy, but a comedy nonetheless.
Did it all play out the way the movie portrays it? I sincerely doubt it. In fact, as we’ve already discussed, the movie outright tells you that it made a lot of it up. But given the music that was being created and given who made it, it feels right, and that’s ultimately what’s more important.
Fiction, let alone fiction films, can only do so much when it comes to telling you the exact truth. It can present you with the true order in which events occur, but it can only present you with an interpretation of what it was like to be there. And frankly, accuracy isn’t a fictional film’s job. Its job is to provide you with emotional truth, not literal fact. Maybe you have an obligation to not disparage an artist’s character by calling them a nazi or something like that, but that’s about it.
On top of all that, 24 Hour Party People is simply more fun to watch because unlike a lot of biopics, at no point is it pretending to be journalism. We can make similar points about Love & Mercy, one of the better biopics I watched. In many ways, Love & Mercy is about the moment where outsider thinking meets mental illness. Brian Wilson had a unique gift for sound creation and composition, but it was also a gift that took a tole on him and left him vulnerable to manipulation. As such, large swaths of it have a unique dream like feeling that would be severely undercut if was forced to stay within the bounds of pure fact.
All biopics contain a certain degree of bullshit. But in the end, all that matters is telling an effective story. If you want facts, look not at fiction.
If you’re writing a biopic, treat your subject with respect.
Sounds obvious, right?
Let us consider Coal Miner’s Daughter, a 1980 biopic about country singer Loretta Lynn. There are admirable qualities in this movie. Sissy Spacek’s performance is incredible, even if she can’t quite pull off playing a teenager in the early sections of the movie. (Not quite her fault though, for it was ridiculous to ask her to do so in the first place.) Moreover, I appreciate that it’s a movie partially about the physical and mental exhaustion of constant overwork and performing.
However, Coal Miner’s Daughter constantly makes jokes at Loretta Lynn’s expense. It constantly calls her stupid, it robs her of most of her agency as a driving character in the plot, and worst of all, there’s a scene where Loretta’s raped by her new husband Doolittle, the character who does have narrative agency, and the movie basically blows it off like no big deal.
Just… no.
Let us also look at the 1997 biopic Selena. Now, Selena doesn’t commit any crimes as egregious as those in Coal Miner’s Daughter. In fact, I’d argue that Selena loves its subject a little too much, for she has no character flaws and she’s always in the right. (It’s almost like making a biopic about someone two years after their murder is a bad idea.) However, Selena doesn’t have any agency for most of the movie, and I don’t like that so much of her arc in the movie is about falling for a man. I realize that’s a bit of an oversimplification, and that it’s really about standing up to her father. But I’m not willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Loretta Lynn and Selena Quintanilla-Pérez both deserve better. Loretta Lynn is a country powerhouse who deserves more than to be the butt of a joke and Selena was a gifted singer and performer who deserved to be treated like a nuanced human being and not the subject of a Hallmark feel good movie. (I’m sorry, I really don’t like this movie.)
So yes, it should be obvious to treat your subject with respect. And yes, we can chalk some of this up to regressive ‘80s bullshit and the proximity of Selena’s release to its subject’s death.
But apparently it isn’t.
The best music documentaries do more than just tell the story.
I don’t give a shit about Metallica.
Well, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never actually sat down with their music for a long enough amount of time to be able to make such a comment, unless you count “I Disappear” (and it’s gloriously dumb video). From the Mission Impossible II soundtrack. Which I owned. For some reason.
The point is I’m not really a metal guy, and I was curious as to whether or not that would bare any weight on my enjoyment of the 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.
It didn’t. It’s one of the best movies I watched in the set.
During the filming of the documentary, Lars Ulrich started his crusade again Napster, making the group more unpopular than ever, bassist Jason Newsted quit the band, James Hetfield was struggling with substance abuse issues, and there was the small issue of the band members hating each other. We watch them try to communicate and be respectful of one another as they work on a new album and go to therapy, we watch them fail, and then we watch them finally get their shit together. Though there’s probably an extra emotional element to the doc if you’re a fan, it doesn’t really matter if you like them or not. Swap out some nouns and it could be the story of any band.
Now let’s look at a example about one of my favorite music acts of all time. The 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest.
In the second half of the movie, we see a glimpse into why the group probably split up in the first place. (This was made before their final album and Phife’s passing, of course.) Mainly, it shows us the communication breakdown between Q-Tip and Phife, culminating in a fight that nearly gets violent backstage at a show. Though it’s clear that the two have a great deal of affection for one another, they can no longer work together, and the movies paints a clear picture as to why that is.
Unfortunately, before we get there, we have to sit through the first half of the documentary. Here lies your standard music documentary stuff. “Here’s our story in the order that it happened.” There’s no real insight that those of us who’ve spent our lives loving this group haven’t heard before, or if you weren’t one of these people, it has nothing you can’t get more thoroughly elsewhere.
There are a lot of documentaries that fall into this problem. Two that come to mind our 20 Feet From Stardom and The Punk Singer, documentaries about the history of backup singers and Bikini Kill and Le Tigre co-founder Kathleen Hanna, respectively. To be abundantly clear, neither of these documentaries are “bad.” Not by a long shot. 20 Feet From Stardom shines some much needed light on some artists who’ve been in the shadows for far too long and Kathleen Hanna deserves to be the subject of a million documentaries. However, I would argue that neither of these documentaries aspire to do anything more than simply tell the stories and add a bare minimum of context.
It’s not that these documentaries are obligated to do anything grander. But what I’m really talking about here is the difference between a good music documentary and a great one. Put it another way: My least favorite documentary I watched was I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco, which is a film about… Wilco. Specifically, it’s about the tumultuous process of getting their magnum opus Yankee Foxtrot Hotel recorded and released. While insightful, all the documentary consists of is talking heads telling us what happened, intercut with footage of performances.
Only so much of this can be helped. However, the “show, don’t tell” rule applies to documentaries, and I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is in perpetual violation of this concept.
Maybe I’m being too demanding. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect a super introspective documentary each and every time. You’re probably right, and I do think there’s a middle ground. Marley, for example, teaches the audience not just about the life of Bob Marley, but the history of all reggae music, Rastafarianism, the shifting politics of Jamaica, and so much more. It’s so comprehensive that you truly feel like you’ve learned everything about him.
And then there’s Amy, probably the best documentary I watched. The movie that tells the story of Amy Winehouse, and in the process, implicates the public and her fandom in her death. As someone who made an Amy Winehouse joke or two back in high school… let’s just say it had a particular effect on me.
It’s not enough just to tell the story. You need something to say as well.
If you’re making a movie about loving music, genre shouldn’t matter.
I want a hip hop High Fidelity. You want a hip hop High Fidelity. We all want a hip hop High Fidelity. Dart Adams wrote two fantastic articles about this very subject.
I just want to add a quick point.
As Dart already points out, High Fidelity and Almost Famous are probably the two most famous music appreciation movies amongst lovers of both mediums. Though I like Almost Famous a little less every time I see it (mostly because I’ve watched it too many times), I certainly count myself amongst their fans. At a certain point, one has to wonder why these films resonate with so many people.
Of course, they’re both well-made, well-written films. However, I think it has more to do with the specific effects of this film on the audience’s relationship with music. Specifically, how they portray falling in love with music in the first place. The way music informs whatever’s going on in our lives, whether that be a breakup or a coming of age, and how it allows us to access some of our deepest emotions. Music is a vital part of our lives, and these movies allow us to relive discovering that part over and over again.
For a lot of filmmakers and film executives, that music was clearly the classic rock of the 1960s and 1970s.
Now, to be fair, there are non-artistic reasons classic rock movies get made time and time again. Classic rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s is some of the most profitable well-known music ever made, so it’s not that much of a risk to greenlight an Elton John biopic or something in that arena. And also to be fair, we’ve had substantially more movies and TV shows about other kinds of music in recent years, mainly in the hip hop arena.
That said, we still see classic rock evangelized over and over again. I love classic rock, but frankly, at this point, it’s a little boring.
Hip hop is basically the biggest music genre on the planet. As such, we have more movies and shows about the creation of hip hop, Straight Outta Compton being the most prominent example on my list. However, I don’t feel like we’ve seen a movie or a show about the worship of hip hop in the same way that Almost Famous and High Fidelity are both about the worship of classic rock. We don’t have a movie about being a regular hip hop fan. We don’t have the self-indulgent scene of some dude listing most-own rap albums or a Zooey Deschanel equivalent who puts on “My Summer Vacation” to explain to her parents why she’s leaving home. (Then again, I just watched the Utopia Falls trailer, which looks, umm……….)
Jokes aside, I’m sure plenty watched Almost Famous and thought about the first time they heard “America” by Simon & Garfunkel. (I’m sure at this point, for most people, it was probably this very movie.) But I’ve yet to watch the movie that reminded me of the night I stayed up late listening to Black on Both Sides for the first time on my discman. (Dave Chappelle’s Block Party doesn’t count.)
There’s no reason why lovers of other genres shouldn’t get their own High Fidelity as well. I’d happily watch a disco High Fidelity or an electronic High Fidelity or a jazz High Fidelity, not just because I love all these genres as well, but because diehard fans deserve to see their love portrayed on screen just as much as fans of classic rock.
It would be nice if Hollywood would acknowledge that all these genres exist. They won’t, mostly because of commerce. The bombing of a slew of EDM movies probably didn’t help the cause for a lot of electronic music fans, and plenty of genres just don’t have as big an audience. But on principal, these fans and these artists deserve love too.
A simple breakdown of the ones I liked and didn’t like.
Liked
Docs
Amy
Cobain: Montage of Heck
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Dig!
I couldn’t find a way to talk about Dig! in more detail. I just want you to know that this documentary is completely insane and I highly recommend that you watch it.
Dont Look Back
Gaga: Five Foot Two
Madonna: Truth or Dare
Marley
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Original Cast Album: Company
Shut Up and Sing
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Biopics
Control
La Vie En Rose
Love & Mercy
24 Hour Party People
Music Making Movies
Almost Famous
Get Him to the Greek
Her Smell
Perfect Blue
Sing Street
We Are The Best!
Whiplash
Mostly Liked
Docs
A Band Called Death
Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest
The Punk Singer
20 Feet From Stardom
Biopics
Lady Sings the Blues
The Runaways
Straight Outta Compton
What’s Love Got to Do with It
Music Making Movies
Begin Again
Frank
Inside Llewyn Davis
Once
School of Rock
Vox Lux
Mostly Disliked
Biopics
Ray
Shine
Walk the Line
Music Making Movies
Beyond the Lights
Crazy Heart
Ricki and the Flash
A Star is Born
Disliked
Docs
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco
Biopics
Cadillac Records
Coal Miner’s Daughter
The Doors
Dreamgirls
Selena
Sid & Nancy
