This week’s biggest home entertainment release arrives fresh from the Oscars, where it missed the top prize but took the most awards of the night. Bohemian Rhapsody (Fox, 12) has somehow withstood any amount of critical scorn and toxic publicity regarding its accused-rapist director to emerge as a strange object of popular adoration, uniting baby-boomer nostalgists and teenagers alike. Quite a feat for a film that hits every stop on the Bad Musical Biopic Express, from cartoonish prosthetics to sanitised sexuality to cheesetastic “eureka” scenes of creative inspiration. It’s a genre with far richer scope for going wrong, or at least drably formula-bound, than spectacularly right, and with biopics of Elton John, David Bowie and Aretha Franklin, among others, all heading our way, it’s been reignited big time.
But what about the good ones? Several film-makers (and some very fine actors) over the years have pulled off the approach of channelling a musician’s actual spirit on screen, in manners both straightforwardly dramatised and wildly avant garde – and, thankfully, some of the best can be easily found online.
Among the conventional, Oscar-chasing brigade, Michael Apted’s earthy 1980 Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (available via Amazon) remains unparallelled, having set the bar for subsequent efforts from Walk the Line to Ray. Crucially, Apted doesn’t treat the country queen’s rags-to-riches trajectory as a romantic celebrity origin story. Rather, it’s a textured, domestically detailed character study of an ordinary Kentucky woman who happened to become famous, and Sissy Spacek’s extraordinary, deservedly Oscar-graced performance treats its subject in much the same nitty-gritty way. That she does her own singing, authentically enough to net a brief major-label record deal, is a virtuoso feat, casually worn.
At the opposite end of the formal scale is François Girard’s dizzy dazzler Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1994) (also on Amazon), which, as the title promises, is an ideally discursive, dissociated encapsulation of a subject whose eccentric brilliance would never have suited a Wikipedia-on-film structure. The Canadian pianist is instead captured in fragments, some biographically enacted by actor Colm Feore, others offering oblique, animated interpretations of Gould’s artistry, in a mosaic numbered to evoke Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
Todd Haynes, of course, knows a thing or two about reinventing the musical biopic. I’m Not There, his abstract 2007 celebration of Bob Dylan as refracted through multiple characters, holds up beautifully, even if it’s unavailable to stream in the UK. Once even harder to find, however, is his marvellous 43-minute anomaly, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), which ingeniously dramatises the late singer’s struggles with anxiety and anorexia using only Barbie dolls – an ironic, satire-rich stunt that gradually takes on a more tender air of psychological play therapy. Withdrawn from circulation for years following a lawsuit from the Carpenter family, it now thrives online in scuffed but oddly apt-feeling bootleg form: you can stream it for free at the Internet Archive.
Scratched and messy by design is Alex Cox’s still-jolting punk elegy Sid & Nancy (available via iTunes), which finds a kind of extreme-trash lyricism in the vomit-spattered downfall of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungen: performed with riotous, razor-edge conviction by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb, it’s rightly hard to watch – as desolate and glamourless a plunge into the rock’n’roll void as we’ve yet seen.
Prefer a little twinkle in your star portraits? Take comfort in golden age Hollywood, which mastered a form of musical biopic with scarcely any factual grounding whatsoever, instead pushing the “musical” half of the equation for all it’s worth. In the delicious 1946 meringue Till the Clouds Roll By (Amazon again, though also free on YouTube), it’s worth rather a lot. Ostensibly about prolific musical theatre composer Jerome Kern, it glosses fictitiously over his life, instead offering one extravagantly staged number from his bursting songbook after another: Judy Garland on Look for the Silver Lining, Frank Sinatra on Ol’ Man River, and so on. As biography, it makes Bohemian Rhapsody look like cinéma vérité; as a pop celebration, it’s delightfully honest about its priorities.
New to streaming and DVD this week
The Guilty
(Signature, 15)
A rogue police officer (Jakob Cedergren) handles a kidnap case from the confines of a call centre. A Jake Gyllenhaal-starring remake of Gustav Möller’s cracking Danish thriller is already under way, but it’s hard to see much room for improvement.
An Elephant Sitting Still
(Drakes Avenue, 15)
The 29-year-old Chinese novelist-turned-film-maker Hu Bo killed himself in 2017 after completing this massive debut, a four-hour wallow in existential ennui. Undeniably hard work, but overwhelmingly flooded with feeling and beauty.
The House That Jack Built
(Curzon Artificial Eye, 18)
Lars von Trier’s extravagantly grotesque, self-referential serial-killer study arrives on DVD so you can fast-forward through all the unbearable bits, leaving just a few minutes with the late Bruno Ganz at the end.
Utøya: July 22
(Modern Films, 15)
Made before Paul Greengrass’s Netflix-backed 22 July, Erik Poppe’s sweat-inducing, real-time dramatisation of the Anders Breivik massacre is the superior film, though the moral dubiousness of the enterprise is hard to shake.
