Representing popular music stardom on screen: the popular music biopic

Abstract

Biopics of popular music stars have become quite popular in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with a number of box-office successes and movie awards in the genre. In seemingly offering a glimpse of the ‘real story’ behind the star persona, biopics contribute to individual star images but they also reproduce broader narratives of popular music stardom. This paper offers a brief description of some of the central tropes of popular music stardom before detailing how they are reproduced in four recent biopics. Further, the paper also discusses the popular music biopic's ambiguous relationship to truth. On the one hand, the biopic must continually assert its truthfulness in order to gain the authority that a biopic needs to be believable and a source of audience pleasure. On the other hand, however, the biopic can never be a ‘real’ truth as it is constrained by both the conventions of cinematic realism and broader ideologies of popular music stardom. In its complicated merging of truth and fiction, we argue, the popular music biopic reflects the socially constructed nature of stardom more generally.

Keywords:

• biopics
• popular music
• stardom
• celebrity
• authenticity

Notes

1. Unless the role was a version of the rock star persona, such as Mick Jagger's performance in Performance. In his next film, you can only see ‘Mick Jagger playing Ned Kelly’, never Ned Kelly.

2. They are not really ‘pre-rock’ as their subjects are filtered through the ideologies of the rock era. Given the ideological significance to rock of its origins in folk, country and blues, no clear distinction between ‘rock’ and ‘non-rock’ can be drawn. Thus, although the two most successful biopics, Walk The Line and Ray, have subjects from outside of the rock mainstream, they are treated in a manner consistent with rock ideology, reflecting the way that the rock ideology has become central to how all popular music genres (and stars) are understood.

3. For a discussion of the distinction between ‘star’ and ‘celebrity’ in this context, see Marshall, 2007, pp. 6–7.

4. ‘Hit the Road Jack’ was actually composed by Percy Mayfield. In this example the film makers are reproducing not only idea of songwriting as a form of self-expression but also the way in which pop singers are often viewed as the author of a song even if they did not compose it.

5. Where are the biopics of Charlie Watts (married for 46 years), or Mose Allison (married for 59 years)?

6. Within popular music, probably the most famous example of cinema verite is DA Pennebaker's film about Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of the UK, Don't Look Back.

7. A feature-length documentary on Joy Division was released at roughly the same time as Control. Ironically, the documentary was shot in colour rather than black and white, though the footage it showed of the 1970s was presented in a way that signified ‘aged’. The near-concurrent releases of Control and Joy Division the documentary would undoubtedly have affected the response to Control in some indeterminable way. Of course, one significant difference between the documentary and the drama is that in the documentary we see the current, ‘real’ members of Joy Division looking back and thus, to some extent, rationalising the biography in the light of what went before. However, this post-hoc rationalisation is also an inherent part of the biopic; the fact that most viewers know what happens to Ian Curtis at the end of the film gives much of the earlier narrative with an added significance.

8. Finding the right actor to play the biopic's subject is, therefore, a difficult task because the actor's own status (and what the audience knows about them) will, in turn, inflect upon the subject's story. Stephen Woolley, director of the biopic Stoned, about Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones, stated that choosing Ewan McGregor or Jude Law to play Jones means that the audience sees McGregor or Law, and not Jones. However, as Morley then considers, choosing an unknown artist risks undermining the subject's own status (Morley, 2005).

9. We use the term ‘symbolic annihilation’ in a different way from Custen. Custen uses it to refer to the exclusion of certain figures from biopics, thus painting them out of Hollywood's account of history. In our usage, the inclusion of individuals in biopics is what leads to their symbolic annihilation, as the image comes to replace reality.

10. Some of the more inventive biopics make use of this fact. For example, in 24 Hour Party People, the Buzzcocks’ Howard Devoto appears midway through a scene to clarify that what you are watching did not actually happen. See also I'm Not There, Todd Haynes’ account of Bob Dylan's early career.