Rock Biopics
The rock biopic never goes away. Its popularity waxes and wanes, and not everyone will agree on what the great ones are.
Just look at the love-it-or-thumb-your-nose-at-it phenomenon that was “Bohemian Rhapsody” — or at Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” seems to be a movie that audiences have embraced more than critics have.
What we can all agree on, perhaps, is how much we cherish this form.
The great rock biopics render the kind of exuberance and excitement that are singular–and seldom prevail in experiencing other movie genres.
The good movies are about art, fame, sex and drugs.
They’re about the electricity of rock, soul, funk, punk and hip-hop.
They’re about actors not just playing but becoming pop stars by immersing themselves in the lives of the characters they inhabit.
Here are the greatest rock biopics of the past four decades, which are worth seeing–and revisiting (if you had already seen them).
Notorious
A lurid trip through the violence and hunger, the verbal brilliance and money fever of the hip-hop world, which George Tillman Jr.’s drama views as both heroic and destructive (often for the same reasons).
Dressed in pin stripes and bowler hat, Jamal Woolard is uncanny as the imperious-on-the-outside, haunted-on-the-inside Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G., who saunters arounds like a mountainous gangsta John Wayne, imposing himself on each encounter. He starts off as a crook, then becomes a put-on crook who’s reborn into a rap superhero, making up his smoky dark rhymes on the spot, using the words to seduce. But the movie also teases out the glee in Biggie (he’s like a kid cracking up at his own bravado), which is one reason it’s a far richer, subtler, and more potent hip-hop chronicle than “Straight Outta Compton.”
