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In 2007, a movie was released with the potential to kill the music biopic once and for all. That movie was Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Unfortunately, it bombed at the box office and never got the cultural reach it deserved.
The following decade saw a steady stream of music biopics, many of them rigidly adhering to the exact formula Walk Hard had mercilessly lampooned. Most turned a healthy profit and several even picked up Academy Award nominations. Then, in 2018, Bohemian Rhapsody happened. The film was an enormous crowd-pleasing success, grossing nearly a billion dollars worldwide and earning Rami Malek an Academy Award for Best Actor. Suddenly, the music biopic was back in a big way.
Over the past eight years, audiences have seen the lives of artists such as Elton John, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, and Robbie Williams dramatized and deconstructed on the big screen. Occasionally, the genre produces something genuinely interesting, like Better Man. More often, however, these films amount to little more than glorified jukebox musicals with only a passing interest in their subjects.
Michael, a biopic covering the early years of Michael Jackson’s career, firmly belongs in that latter category. It delivers a heavily sanitized, crowd-pleasing portrait that often feels less like a biography and more like a hagiography.
Michael covers Michael Jackson’s career from his early years as the lead singer of the Jackson 5 up until the group’s final performance together in 1984, with the release of Bad serving as a brief epilogue. The film finds its central drama in the relationship between Michael and his abusive father, Joseph Jackson, a man who relentlessly pushed his sons toward stardom and was not above using a belt to discipline them.
Joseph is portrayed almost entirely as a one-dimensional villain who never once shows his children any affection and sees them solely as a means of enriching himself. To him, Michael is not a son but a goose that lays golden eggs. Colman Domingo, who delivered phenomenal work in the final season of Euphoria, creates a genuinely terrifying presence in Joseph, but the screenplay gives him little opportunity to portray an actual human being rather than a monster.
The same criticism applies to almost everyone in the film, with the notable exception of Jaafar Jackson, who completely disappears into the role of his uncle. He is unquestionably the movie’s greatest asset, yet even he is given far less material than the subject deserves. Michael Jackson was a deeply complex figure: a man scarred by an abusive childhood, plagued by insecurities about his appearance, living with vitiligo, struggling with a lack of genuine friendships during his youth, and dealing with the aftermath of the horrific Pepsi commercial accident that left him dependent on pain medication for much of the rest of his life.
All of these elements are touched upon, but only in the most superficial manner imaginable. The film suggests that Michael’s collection of exotic animals was a substitute for the friends he never had, yet barely explores the idea. Likewise, the “child trapped in a man’s body” aspect of his personality is reduced to little more than two scenes: one in which he visits a toy store and another where he tries to convince his older brothers to play Twister, only to find them preoccupied with dating women and other adult pursuits. Rather than examining the psychological wounds that shaped Michael Jackson into one of the most fascinating and contradictory celebrities in modern history, the film merely checks the relevant boxes before moving on to the next hit song.
The film’s primary dramatic objective is Michael overcoming his fear of his father and finally telling him the truth while looking him straight in the eye. That is presented as his greatest challenge because virtually everything else in his life seems to come to him with surprisingly little effort. We see him tinkering in the studio during the making of Off the Wall and, more importantly, Thriller, but the creative process behind these landmark albums is given remarkably little attention.
Instead, songs from both records are frequently used as needle drops throughout the film, ensuring a constant stream of Michael Jackson’s biggest hits accompanies the narrative. From an entertainment perspective, this approach works. These songs are timeless, and the film wisely keeps them flowing to maintain the audience’s engagement.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering whether a Mamma Mia!-style approach might have served Jackson’s music better. Rather than a sanitized biopic that reveals very little audiences don’t already know, an original story built around his catalogue could have made for a more interesting and honest experience. As it stands, Michael often plays less like a biography and more like a greatest-hits compilation set against the backdrop of Jackson’s rise to superstardom.
By ending its story in 1988, years before the sexual abuse allegations and many of the controversies that would come to define the latter half of Jackson’s life, the film avoids virtually all of the most difficult subjects. The result is a feel-good crowd-pleaser that presents Michael Jackson as little short of a saint, more interested in preserving a legacy than examining the complicated man behind it.
It would have been far more interesting to see how Jackson dealt with the sexual abuse allegations, his gradual decline in popularity, the birth of his children, the increasingly extreme plastic surgery, and the ever more outlandish public incidents, such as dangling his infant son over a hotel balcony. These are the events that transformed Michael Jackson from the world’s biggest pop star into one of the most controversial celebrities of his generation.
Instead, Michael is largely content to avoid the darker chapters of its subject’s life. It is far more interested in entertaining audiences with a parade of beloved songs than in providing a meaningful character study. As a result, the film rarely ventures beyond the surface of who Michael Jackson was as a person.
I liked Michael as a piece of entertainment. As someone who was a young pre-teen fan during the 1980s, I found it to be an enjoyable trip down memory lane, and I certainly had a good time watching it. What it is not, however, is an honest portrayal of a deeply complicated and controversial musician.
Another approach might have served the material better. Rather than attempting to cover decades of Jackson’s life, the film could have focused on a single defining period. A movie centered entirely on the creation of Thriller or the recording of We Are the World and the USA for Africa project would likely have resulted in a far more focused and compelling drama.
While the closing titles hint at a sequel, I cannot help but wonder how honest a film covering Jackson’s life during the 1990s and beyond could really be. After all, members of his family and his estate serve as producers on this project. That inevitably raises questions about how willing any continuation would be to confront the controversies that came to define the latter half of his life. Fortunately, there are plenty of filmmakers who are not beholden to the wishes of the Jackson family and may one day offer a more balanced examination of one of popular music’s most fascinating and polarizing figures.
