Welcome to the Center for Popular Music (CPM) blog! This blog is edited by CPM librarian and popular culture critic, Logan Dalton. It will showcase items and collections in our Archive and Reading Room and connect them to current happenings in the world of popular music through list, feature, interview, and review articles. This blog will be more in-depth than our social media posts, less in-depth than an academic article, and often have a companion playlist on the CPM Spotify account.
In honor of the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as the legendary singer-songwriter, our first blog article breaks down the five best popular music biopics. (Unfortunately, the CGI-chimp starring Robbie Williams biopic Better Man is being released in January and didn’t make the cut for consideration despite getting surprisingly good advance reviews.)
5. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
Sadly, Dewey Cox isn’t an actual person, so the 2007 rock biopic spoof Walk Hard wasn’t eligible for inclusion on this list. However, despite flights of fancy featuring Madonna (An unhinged Evan Rachel Wood) and Pablo Escobar, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story does have biographical information about the master of popular music parody and is eligible. “Weird Al” Yankovic himself co-wrote the film, and it stars Daniel Radcliffe, who continues to choose roles that are the polar opposite of Harry Potter. Weird explores actual elements of Yankovic’s life and influences like his love for polka music, his relationship with the eccentric radio host Dr. Demento, and even the idea of the “Yankovic bump” where if “Weird Al” Yankovic parodied a song, it would get a sales and airplay boost. But it turns these real-life incidents, like Yankovic getting his first accordion from a door-to-door salesman and Madonna asking him to parody “Like A Virgin”, up to eleven for maximum comedy gold. By the time Weird reaches an action-packed climax, Radcliffe loses himself in rock’n’roll excess and sheer silliness as classic “Weird Al” Yankovic cuts like “Eat It” and “Amish Paradise” find new life in the heightened reality of the film.
4. Straight Outta Compton (2015)
Although it hews a little too closely to hagiography because of Dr. Dre and Ice Cube’s involvement as producers, Straight Outta Compton captures the limitless energy of West Coast gangster rap in the 1980s and 1990s and chronicles the birth, death, and resurrection of hip hop group N.W.A. and its key members Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E. Director F. Gary Gray’s action chop on films like Set It Off and The Negotiator serve him well in building tension in sequences like the opening police raid on Eazy-E’s stash house to any time Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight (A menacing R. Marcos Taylor) appears in the frame. The standout performance in Straight Outta Compton is O’Shea Jackson Jr. as his father, Ice Cube. Jackson channels the seemingly contradictory rage, creativity, and humor of the artist responsible for the anti-Semitism and homophobia of “No Vaseline” but also the soulful vignettes of “It Was A Good Day” and the raucous comedy of the Friday screenplay. Because some of its events coincide with the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Straight Outta Compton has a lot of social commentary about police brutality and systemic racism. However, the film is at its most effective when it shows the power of music to escape one’s circumstances, like an early scene where Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) sprawls out on the floor at his mother’s apartment, listens to Roy Ayers records, and mentally starts to put the funk into the G-funk subgenre of hip hop.
3. 24 Hour Party People (2002)
The 2002 British film 24 Hour Party People isn’t just a biopic of a single figure, but surveys the entire indie/rock/dance music scene in Manchester from 1976 to the late 1990s centered around Factory Records founder Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) and the Hacienda night club, which was co-owned by the members of New Order. At times, the movie resembles a documentary, like a sequence with early concert footage of the Sex Pistols playing at Lesser Free Trade Hall. However, it occasionally plays fast and loose with the facts, like a cheeky scene where Buzzcocks frontman Howard Devoto (Played by Coronation Street actor Martin Hancock) is having an affair with Wilson’s first wife, and the actual Devoto turns to the camera and states that this actually never happened. Director Michael Winterbotham juggles a whole range of tones in 24 Hour Party People, from solemn after Ian Curtis (A heartbreaking Sean Harris) dies by suicide to frenetic and stressful as the Happy Mondays use the last of Factory Records’ cash to record a missing-the-vocal-tracks stinker of a record in Barbados. The film is a showcase for a generation of British character actors, like Simon Pegg, Paddy Considine, and, of course, Coogan, to pay homage to their guitar, rave, and synth heroes and a rare time and place when art for art’s sake and not just commercial gain had the upper hand for once. (Of course, the Hacienda is luxury apartments now.)
2. Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)
Featuring an Academy Award-winning acting and singing performance from Sissy Spacek, Coal Miner’s Daughter is the gold standard for traditional popular music biopics. It follows the rise of “The First Lady of Country Music” from an impoverished upbringing as one of eight children in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, to marrying hard-drinking, fast-driving former military man Doolittle “Mooney” Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones) at 15 and finally finding fame as a country singer-songwriter and one of the Grand Ole Opry’s brightest stars. Spacek brings a naivete and vulnerability to the role of Lynn without making her the butt of the joke, and her warm chemistry with Beverly D’Angelo’s Patsy Cline is easily one of the highlights of the film and provides a counterbalance to Lynn’s turbulent relationship with Mooney. Coal Miner’s Daughter spends most of its runtime in Appalachia and rural Washington, establishing a wellspring of authenticity from which Loretta Lynn’s songs bubble up and reach the masses as the story progresses. The cherry on top of this biopic is getting a glimpse of pre-tourist-destination Nashville, including cameos from Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, and Minnie Pearl as themselves.
1. I’m Not There (2007)
Director Todd Haynes already explored fame and musicians in his 1987 directorial debut Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and the 1998 glam rock fever dream Velvet Goldmine, but I’m Not There is basically his doctoral dissertation on the subject matter featuring six actors of different genders, races, and ages representing and playing aspects of Bob Dylan’s personality, body of work, and influences. There’s the precociously brilliant Marcus Carl Franklin embodying Dylan’s Depression-era blues and folk roots as he rides the rails hoping to catch a glimpse of his hero and namesake Woody Guthrie, and Ben Whishaw’s Arthur Rimbaud providing poetic insights in stark black and white film stock. Then, there’s Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), whose “finger-pointing” songs take the folk scene by storm and lead to a biopic within a biopic starring Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), who epitomizes the rebelliousness (and male chauvinism) of the actors in New Hollywood films like Easy Rider. There is also the aging outlaw charms of Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), whose story is a slice-of-life Western about urbanization destroying the simple life on the frontier. However, a chameleon-like Cate Blanchett’s Jude Quinn is the most compelling character in the film and brings in a burst of life and controversy when he “sells out” and “goes electric” with fans, critics, and “friends” fighting for a piece of his identity and projecting themselves on him. I’m Not There transcends the biopic genre, uses the iconic figure of Bob Dylan to provide insightful commentary on the history of American popular music, and also acts as a visually fragmented portrait of the man himself, even though his name is never spoken in the film.
Honorable mentions: Runaways, Sid and Nancy, Elvis (1979), La Bamba, Ray, Selena, 8-Mile, Walk the Line, The Doors, Get On Up, Cadillac Records, Bird, Control
We hope you enjoyed this first CPM blog post. Feel free to comment with your thoughts or your own personal favorite popular music biographical film on our Facebook, Instagram, or X posts.
-Logan Dalton
The views expressed in this blog are the staff member’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Center for Popular Music and Middle Tennessee State University.
