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James Mangold ’s Bob Dylan biopic , A Complete Unknown , would seem to differentiate a return to an era of serious - disposed picture about serious - minded musicians , psychological role study rather than jukebox - inflected , semi - fantasist extravaganzas . ( Scott Cooper ’s upcomingDeliver Me From Nowhere , about Bruce Springsteen , look to continue the trend . )
In honor of its dismissal this past workweek , it ’s worth looking back at the films that have led us here . The following is a list of the seven expert music biopics ever released .
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7. Walk the Line (2005)
Mangold ’s early medicine biopic was the prototypical 21st - one C case of the genre . take the air the Line , the birth - to - death story of Johnny Cash ( played by the Oscar - nominate Joaquin Phoenix ) , was memorably burlesque in Jake Kasdan ’s spectacular 2007 filmWalk severely : The Dewey CoxStory(“Dewey Cox has to think about his whole life before he play … ” ) , and it ’s prosperous to see why .
take the air the Linehas a time - derail , playing - the - hits structure that just do gumption for this kind of movie . The 2010s to 2020s running game of second - rate musician bio - dramas ( Bohemian Rhapsody , Rocketman , Stardust , Whitney Houston : I Wanna Dance with Somebody ) essay in vain to replicate this movie ’s quondam - Hollywood charm but failed to becharm what madeWalk the Lineso captivate when it premier in 2005 .
6. I’m Not There (2007)
A conventional biopic can not contain Bob Dylan , an enigma whose current film life , courtesy of Mangold , correctly but somewhat evasively characterizes him as “ a complete unknown . ” intimately to look at this utterly strange saber saw puzzler , construct by co - screenwriters Oren Moverman and Todd Haynes and directed by the latter .
Six thespian play six different aspects of Dylan , none of them named Bob Dylan . Some of them ( like Marcus Carl Franklin ’s 11 - yr - old Black troubadour calling himself Woody Guthrie ) resemble the vocaliser / songwriter only in superficial , artistic ways . Others , like the vocalist character played by Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale , are closer fits . They have one matter in common — to see them properly , as with certain masterful paintings , you have to step back and see all the brushstrokes arrayed side by side .
5. Love & Mercy (2015)
The second of Oren Moverman ’s screenplays to make the cutting here ( this one carbon monoxide gas - written by Michael Alan Lerner),Love & Mercyis an innovative film life story that fittingly assigns two vastly different eras of the sprightliness of the Beach Boys engineer Brian Wilson to two different actors .
The Batman‘s Riddler , Paul Dano , delicate and intense , is Wilson in the era ofPet Sounds , the 1966 record album that cemented his legacy as a genius . John Cusack , heavy - footed and doleful , is Wilson in his XL , suffer at ocean and under the influence of a pill - pushing psychologist ( Paul Giamatti ) . The performances are stellar , but it ’s the immortal music that catch and hold back you .
4. The Pianist (2002)
Famed Polish Jewish composer and piano player Władysław Szpilman was 28 and a virtuoso on Polish radio when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 . Rounded up , along with his family , into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 , he was after separated from them and last for five years , cover in attics and private apartments in occupied Warsaw .
His selection ultimately depended upon entertaining a Wermacht captain ( Thomas Kretschmann ) with a preference for Chopin . The Brutalist‘s Adrien Brody won the Best Actor Oscar for his wrenching , organic structure - transmute turn as Szpilman in this torturing lookout with adulation for incongruously refined , lilt music at its core .
3. Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021)
Jonathan Larson , the martyr - hero of the musical theater world , was 35 when he died of an aortic dissection on the dark of the first Off - Broadway preview of his masterpieceRentin 1996 . His cause of bring musicals to the masses was later taken up by successor Lin - Manuel Miranda , whose notably assure 2021 debut characteristic film adapt Larson ’s to begin with autobiographical musical , Tick , Tick … Boom ! .
The film cover Larson ’s unsuccessful attempt to fill out a melodious based on Orwell’s1984and unwittingly foreshadows Larson ’s abbreviated life history in covering the story of his best friend ( Robin de Jesús ) being stricken with AIDS . The chief high spot of the moving-picture show is Andrew Garfield ’s Academy Award - nominated execution as Larson , which is loose - limbed and charming .
2. Maestro (2023)
suffuse with the balance of exquisite world and high - flown fantasy that is itself the authentication of bully euphony , Bradley Cooper ’s biopic of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein , Maestro , is in every sense an betterment on hisA Star is Bornretread of 2018 .
Anchored by well - equal performance by Cooper himself as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as his wife Felicia , the film is more a portrait of the sexual dynamics of their marriage than a history about his medicine , per se ; nonetheless , Cooper direct a bravura sequence of Bernstein conducting in the Ely Cathedral in England that dead catch Bernstein ’s charisma on the soapbox . The film is very possibly a modernistic masterpiece and merit another look after being shut out at last class ’s Academy Award .
1. Amadeus (1984)
In its own way , the central relationship inAmadeus , between the divinely inspired but insipidly crude Wolfgang Mozart ( Tom Hulce ) and the haughty but second-rate Antonio Salieri ( F. Murray Abraham , who win an Oscar for his part ) , is as paradigmatic as Romeo and Juliet , King Arthur and Lancelot , the black hat and the blanched hat .
Its portrayal of mad jealousy motivate by grudge regard reveals something profound about musician and composers – the gift for music is a tactile accomplishment border by one ’s own physical limitations , all the more infuriating because it can rise up to such supernatural heights in a few lucky , talented geniuses .
