What's one movie you could watch a million times? For me, it's Walk Hard starring John C. Reilly. The parody of music biopics takes a crack at every cliché of the genre—from over-romanticizing the moment an artist wrote their famous song, to how quickly these career-spanning movies breeze through their life. Walk Hard is also just packed to the brim with ridiculous jokes, and anything that makes me laugh in 2025 is a win.
I end up rewatching Walk Hard around this time every year because every fall, a new music biopic enters the race for Best Picture. Last year, it was A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Over the years, we've seen Maestro (2023), Elvis (2022), Respect (2021), Rocketman (2019), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), and more. Audiences will watch four (!) Beatles movies in a few years. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This month, Jeremy Allen White stars as Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.
Let's be honest: Music biopics are rarely distinct from one another. You can practically hear the voice-over: From humble origins, an artist will shock the world with some of the greatest songs ever written—all while confounding the naysayers and big wigs of the time who were inexplicably wrong! The subjects of these films always treat their female love interests like garbage for some reason, and they lose any sense of normality in their newfound fame. Yet, even though we know the story beats by heart, we can't get enough of these movies. Even stranger? There seems to be zero consensus among critics and audiences alike on what makes a music biopic good or bad.
So, when reviews dropped for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere—out now in theaters—I thought: What do people actually want from a music biopic? How much should the actor talk and sing just like the artist they're portraying? Should the film cover an artist's entire life, and how much of a creative license are we allowed to tell their story?
I don't know the correct formula, but clearly, neither does Hollywood. Over the past few years, the industry's tweaked certain elements of the genre to hopefully win audiences over who were soured by the last film. Movies like A Complete Unknown and Deliver Me Nowhere focus on one moment in the artist's life instead of flying through their entire careers like we saw in Bohemian Rhapsody and Elvis. A Complete Unknown captured Bob Dylan's controversial use of electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, while Deliver Me from Nowhere sticks to Springsteen's recording of Nebraska in the early '80s. Filmmakers seem to hope the tighter scope helps the viewer understand more about the artist's struggle. It also allows storytellers to hone in on one specific moment that helped make their subject the legend that they are today.
I much prefer this new direction, but it remains unclear if audiences agree. Deliver Me from Nowhere is sitting at just $16 million at the box office after opening weekend, despite a budget of roughly $55 million. It also seems like one of the movies' greatest strengths is that White doesn't even act like Bruce Springsteen—even though Chalamet's celebrated portrayal of Bob Dylan seemed to be the driving factor of his Oscar campaign just last year.
"White doesn't look like Springsteen and smartly, he and [director Scott] Cooper don't try to fake a resemblance," wrote The New York Times's chief film critic, Manohla Dargis. "Much like the man he plays, though, White has tremendous charisma and the kind of endlessly interesting face whose rough beauty and asymmetry draws you to him."
Rolling Stone editor David Fear had a similar opinion. "Thankfully, White does not try to mount an impersonation of Springsteen," he said. "Other than some onstage jumps and a brief, raspy post-concert exchange, there's no real attempt to "do" Bruce… Deliver Me From Nowhere actually works best when you forget you're watching a biopic—an irony, considering the title and marketing."
Some clichés remain the same, but I have to agree—I enjoyed Deliver Me From Nowhere. My dislike of A Complete Unknown is not unknown around the Esquire office, and this Springsteen film felt like it was designed to be the exact opposite experience. It works much better that White chooses not to method-act his way through Springsteen's life. Convincing stubborn record executives that you need to go acoustic to process your trauma felt like a much more believable narrative than Dylan's vocation to teach conservative America that electric guitars are cool—even though such a silly event did occur in real life. Thankfully, Springsteen also breaks the cycle of movies depicting emotionally unavailable male geniuses by actually going to therapy in the film.
Possibly, music biopics only work if you don't treat them like a music biopic at all. As director Scott Cooper told Esquire, it seems that was even his philosophy.
"As I said to Jeremy White, 'Listen, when I'm making a movie about Bruce Springsteen, take that pressure off yourself,' " Cooper said. "We're making a film about us, a man who's a neglected soul who just happens to be Bruce Springsteen, who's repairing himself through music. I hope that five minutes into the movie, people forget that it's about Bruce Springsteen. Hopefully, they see themselves. And then, at the end, they remember, Wow, that was about Bruce Springsteen."
There's only so much that brown-colored contacts can do to make me forget that's Carmy Berzatto from The Bear on the silver screen, but I agree with Cooper. Don't set out to make a music biopic, because they're usually corny and impossible to get right. Just make a good movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment