It's Time To Stop Making Music Biopics

Starring: Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon, Michael Wincott Director: Oliver Stone Year Of Release: 1991 Plot: Although The Doors ostensibly tells the story of the 1960s/1970s rock band, it’s really more about lead singer Jim Morrison. The movie follows him from his days studying film in LA, through the origins of The Doors and their rise to fame. However as Jim becomes ever more infatuated with his own image, he also gets involved with drugs and descends into addiction and alcoholism. He soon starts missing recording sessions and arriving late for concerts, eventually getting charged with indecent exposure in Florida, before tragedy strikes when Jim is only 27.

I’m voting for a moratorium on biopics of musicians. Is anyone with me? My reasoning is that if we go by the musicians who get movies made about them, they’re all rather tedious because they all have exactly the same story. Each and every musician starts out wide eyed and innocent, before success goes to their head and they start believing their own hype. At that point they start to dabble in drugs and/or become alcoholics and their lives start to unravel.

If they are married their partner will leave them, their bandmates and record company will start getting annoyed at their unpredictability and the quality of their music will decline. Then one of two things happen – they either hit rock bottom and find redemption, or more likely they’ll die (and sometimes both).  Either way, biopics suggest that musicians mainly exist not to create wonderful tunes, but to exist as cautionary tales on the evils of addiction.

It would be one thing if this was just a Hollywood cliché – a story that they’ve made up and just can’t help revisiting (well, it is, sort of, as they don’t have to make biopics about musicians, and when they do make a fictional music based flick, they normally just tell the same story) – but the fact is musicians, particularly rock stars, do keep living out this story over and over again. How can you be a rock & roll original who doesn’t care about societal conventions, if you’re just going to do what every other rock star has ever done?

Admittedly it is slightly unfair to tar them all with the same brush, as not all musicians become raging addicts or have terrible problems that lead to their early death. There have, of course, also been exceptions on the music biopics front, which don’t just follows the ‘get famous, get addicted, get dead or redeemed’ pattern, such as the excellent Control, about Ian Curtis’ battles with depression and illness, although admittedly that one is pretty much, Get Famous, Get Depressed, Get Dead. There’s also Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, which despite the title is more about Ian Dury overcoming disability and finding himself  than anything else, as well as Shine, La Vie En Rose, I’m Not There and Backbeat. While some of those flirt with the rise and fall convention, each finds a unique story, or at least a unique way of telling the story.

So maybe not ban musician biopics, but just say that if a musician has been addicted to anything, they can’t have a film made about them.

Take a look below for just a small sampling of the biopics that fit the rise to fame, get addicted, have a downfall then either gets redeemed or die cliché.

TIM ISAAC

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