Everyone knows a genius when they see one. At least they do in biopics. In “A Complete Unknown”, a young Bob Dylan rocks up at the hospital that is treating Woody Guthrie, and instantly Guthrie and Pete Seeger, another folk-music patriarch, recognise he is the real deal. In “Maria”, even a sweating Nazi officer in wartime Athens, for whom a callow Maria Callas is forced to sing, gawps at her talent.
“A Complete Unknown” is up for eight Oscars. “Maria”, another new release, stars Angelina Jolie as the troubled diva. Along with “Better Man”, in which Robbie Williams is portrayed by a CGI ape, these are the latest in a drumbeat of musical biopics. Last year it was Amy Winehouse and Bob Marley. Up soon are a quartet of films about the Beatles (an impending Michael Jackson biopic has reportedly run into legal woes). Why is this genre playing on repeat?
Celebrity is a narrative shortcut. Like modern myths, the outlines of stars’ biographies are familiar, so artful directors can focus on dramatic episodes, rather than squishing a whole life into two hours. You know Mr Dylan is a great American bard and Callas was an opera legend. So James Mangold can concentrate in “A Complete Unknown” on Mr Dylan’s breakthrough in the early 1960s. In “Maria” Pablo Larraín zooms in on the week before Callas’s death in 1977, with flashbacks to her wartime trials, glory days and affair with Aristotle Onassis.
Meanwhile viewers enjoy two performances in one. They see the screen Dylan shake up American music. In parallel they weigh up Timothée Chalamet’s impersonation, comparing his version of Mr Dylan’s oddly winning whine and enigmatic air with the original. Mr Chalamet pulls off this high-wire act with élan. For her part Ms Jolie suggests Callas’s imperious vulnerability.
The music itself is another draw. Musical biopics are, well, musicals. Not only do you get Mr Chalamet’s fine renditions of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone”; you imagine you are present at the creation of these anthems. You may not have heard Callas sing live, but “Maria” teleports you to her breakout triumph in “I Puritani” in 1949.
So a musical career is an efficient storytelling vehicle. It is also inherently dramatic, not just in the artist’s rise from obscurity but in the act of performance itself: the countdown to a headliner’s entrance, the audience’s caprice, the fortune-and-glory stakes. The climax of “A Complete Unknown” is the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 where Dylan scandalously “goes electric” and defects to rock’n’roll. In “Maria”, an ailing Callas tries in secret to revive her faded voice.
At the heart of the musical biopic is a mystery. Genius may be easy to spot, but where does it come from? In “Maria”, Callas reckons “music is born of misery”; you yank it “through your belly, out your poor mouth”. Ouch! “A Complete Unknown” dodges the question. Dylan blows into New York from Minnesota with the gift for lyrics that would ultimately win him a Nobel prize, plus an intuitive sense that “you have to kind of be a freak” to hold a crowd. His only explanation is a cock-and-bull yarn about performing at carnivals.
With the drama and insights, musical biopics typically have a dark undertone. After all, stardom is not all growing your hair wild and wearing shades indoors, as the movie Dylan does. Fame is a prize but it can also be a torment. The famous must wrestle for control of their stories with managers, record labels and, in Callas’s case, domineering partners. “Maria” imagines her telling John F. Kennedy that they are both “lucky angels who can go anywhere we want in the world—but we can never get away”.
This is the flipside of celebrity and of the biopic’s appeal. The star is an idol and a sacrifice, an object of both admiration and envy. When people ask where his songs came from, says the film Dylan bitingly, they really want to know “why the songs didn’t come to them”. Lots of biopics supply a shiver of Schadenfreude alongside devotion, in finales featuring anguish or untimely demise. Think of Elvis Presley, who in “Elvis” (2022) winds up bloated and exploited.
In “Maria”, Callas swoons and dies as operatic heroines tend to. By contrast, Dylan evades the Icarus-like comeuppance that is a ghoulish element in the biopic formula, riding off on his motorbike into a wide-open future. The refusal to conform to type is part of the real Mr Dylan’s greatness—and a reason why “A Complete Unknown” stands out in one of cinema’s favourite genres. ■
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