Do We Really Need Another Biopic?

by Evelyn Homan

If you’ve been paying even the smallest amount of attention to the movie world (hard though it might be, given the utter lack of blockbusters this summer), there’s three kinds of movies that seem to get attention: superhero flicks, popular book adaptations, and the biopic. It’s not as though the good ol’ biographic picture has always existed in Hollywood in some fashion. Laurence of Arabia (1962) or Hans Christian Andersen (1952) took real people and blew them up into larger-than-life characters, often eschewing the actual life stories of the men centered in these stories. Danny Kaye makes Andersen a fantastical cobbler, and Peter O’Toole makes Mr. Of Arabia into a dashing war hero whose real-life exploits are heavily fictionalized to be exciting on the big screen.

The only recent biopic that I can think of that feels in line with the more fantastical “bio”pics of old is Rocketman, which Elton John himself played a role in getting produced — folding in elements of a jukebox musical and more serious ups and downs of the musician’s life, it’s more focused on telling the story of Elton’s stardom in a fun way than giving the nitty-gritty details of his way to the top. That’s what celebrity memoirs are for, after all — that’s where all the dirty laundry gets aired out, on the autobiography page. And wouldn’t you know, Elton wrote one!

The modern biopic, however, wants to be taken more seriously. Or at least, that’s the vibe. 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, focusing on the life of Freddie Mercury, and the more recent biopic of Amy Winehouse’s life, Back To Black (2024), take fascinating musical figures who died too soon and essentially sanitize their lives for an audience. 

The most egregious example of this is Bohemian Rhapsody — Mercury’s former bandmates were involved and wanted the film to be more family-friendly, which meant that important parts of Mercury’s life were simply glossed over, such as his sexuality and his battle with AIDS, and his long-term relationship with Jim Hutton don’t get the time on-screen that they deserved. For as good as the Live Aid recreation is, to ignore such key parts of Mercury’s life and whittle down a bright superstar into a family-friendly feel-good story is terrible.

Winehouse was also not exempt from a bad biopic, with critics and audiences generally agreeing that the story of her life felt pedestrian and didn’t really capture the essence of Winehouse, or get into the more gritty details of her life. The fact that the biopic was being made at all also raised eyebrows, because fans universally acknowledge that the way Winehouse’s life was exploited while she was living it. To exploit her further in her death (Neil Patrick Harris’s garish cake set the bar in hell as it was) more than a decade later felt wrong.

Now comes news that indie juggernaut A24 is looking to acquire rights to a biopic about Anthony Bourdain, whose life can be explored in his numerous beautiful books and countless shows he starred in. A film about Bourdain, Roadrunner, came out in 2021 and was criticized for not only being too soon, but also not giving any new information about Bourdain. So, news of this biopic has had fans of Bourdain understandably upset. There is already so much about Bourdain that he wanted to be shared out there in the world — although his death was truly tragic, there is no more of him left to give, and that’s alright.

That, ultimately, is the big issue with biopics who are working so hard to be sincere, especially when they’re centered on people who were already larger-than-life when their stars were burning brightest. Even the greatest actor alive, or the one who looks just like the now-deceased superstar, cannot ever capture the real essence of that person. Mercury, Winehouse, Bourdain — all of these people were truly one of a kind and cannot ever be replicated, on-screen or otherwise. The kind of lightning in a bottle that these people were can only ever feel like a facsimile when it’s acted out. No matter how hard fans try, they will never 100% know all the small details of their fave’s life, because it was not their life to live. 

The other issue is that one whole life does not transfer well to the big screen. That, funny enough, is what the older “biopics” exceed at — they take the name, and some of the deeds of the real person the story centers on, and then jazz it up with enough creative license so that you don’t mind so much that the historical inaccuracy is glaring. But to take a real life and sincerely try to recreate it for an audience is nigh on impossible. As amazing as superstars are, their lives are filled with mundanity, oddity, and disjointedness just like the everyday person’s. But those mundane moments are also what make up a life. To condense a celebrity’s life into the biggest things that happened to them will naturally remove the real humanity the subjects possessed. In this way, all these sincere biopics not only become exploitative, but they also become manufactured.

The exploitation part only feels more obvious when looking closely at the entire process of making these biopics. Since these films are often about deceased individuals, the stars themselves do not get a say in how they want their story to be portrayed, or what elements about their life they most want to be shared — this is why Rocketman is such an interesting outlier in this biopic space. Furthermore, the families of these people are often not involved either, so the wishes of the families might be completely bypassed in order to craft “a better story”. The fact that Queen’s band members got to have a say in the production of Bohemian Rhapsody is a mixed bag, because although they worked closely with Mercury and got to know him in a way that his lovers or family members might not have, they also got to make themselves as characters look much better than they really were.

Furthermore, the “stan” element of pop culture has steeped for so long that many fans feel entitled to know absolutely everything about the people they love. I don’t feel like this can be entirely blamed on fans, but rather a toxic combination of paparazzi-tabloid expectations and fan culture that has led to celebrity-as-commodity. Some fans feel like they deserve to know every last piece of information about a favorite star of theirs — to feel a bond, or for the sake of knowing, or a million other reasons. So it can be tantalizing to learn about a new tell-all memoir, or a biopic that centers somebody they love. And it can be really juicy to know nuggets of information too — everyone loves gossip, so if you know something others don’t, you feel special for disseminating that information. But this not only fuels ever-more terrifying fan practices — it fuels the biopic machine, in part because it means that there’s an audience for these kinds of films. Using a real person’s real life to achieve money — when you’re not the family, close personal friends, or trusted people of the person the life is about (or, indeed, the person themself!) — feels like a cash grab farce no matter how you slice it.

So, do we need more biopics? Maybe, under the right circumstances. Using a visual medium to tell the story of a life can be a beautiful way of honoring someone, or to relay fascinating (if highly stylized) real life stories. But fans — both casual and dedicated — and moviegoers and even production companies alike need to acknowledge that when you’re trying to tell the story of a superstar, that will never be captured in the way they want it to be. And maybe ask yourself, would that person even want a film made about them? That seems like a good way to determine if you’re doing it because you should, or because you can.

In the case of Anthony Bourdain, it’s nice to see the fans speaking out in the way that Bourdain himself probably would — “Fuck no.”