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This article is part of Portrait Mode, a Slate pop-up series about biopics. What if I told you that there’s a movie in theaters right now directed by one of America’s greatest working filmmakers starring an actor he’s worked with many times, giving a revelatory performance of the sort we’ve never seen him deliver before? Would that sound exciting? What if I told you it was a biopic? Does that word dim the excitement a little, maybe a lot? That’s undoubtedly because the word biopic immediately brings to mind cliché-filled cradle-to-grave stories and not, say, a film exploring a life by depicting just a few hours of it, like Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a first-rate biopic … err … biographical drama, in which Ethan Hawke plays the ill-fated lyricist Lorenz Hart. How toxic has the word biopic become? To disavow the word is now a cliché almost as predictable as, say, a flashback to childhood trauma to explain adult behavior. “This movie is … not a biopic,” director Marielle Heller told Entertainment Weekly while offering a preview of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, her film starring Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers. “Not a biopic” is also how Ana de Armas described Blonde, her 2022 movie about Marilyn Monroe. At a 2023 event at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Oppenheimer writer-director Christopher Nolan rejected the term completely, even offering other genres—specifically the heist movie and the courtroom drama—that he felt more aptly described his movie. The biopic, he said, “is not a useful genre.” By this logic, it’s almost easier to define the genre in negative. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is not a biopic because it focuses on the relationship between Esquire writer Lloyd Vogel and Fred Rogers (played by Matthew Rhys and Tom Hanks, respectively). Blonde is not a biopic because it depicts Monroe’s life through the lens of Joyce Carol Oates’ highly fictionalized 2000 novel of the same name. Oppenheimer is not a biopic because Nolan finds the tendency of “biography post-Freud to attribute characteristics of the person you’re dealing with to their genetics from their parents.” But while each of these movies takes a different approach, they all also attempt to portray the story of the life of a real person. What everyone really seems to be saying is that their projects aren’t biopics because biopics are bad. The history of biographical films has often supported this, and even the good ones have inspired distrust in their accuracy. For an example, look no further than Blue Moon’s predecessor, 1948’s Words and Music, an earlier attempt to depict the life of Hart (Mickey Rooney) and his partnership with composer Richard Rodgers (Tom Drake), released five years after Hart’s death. The product of MGM’s famed Freed Unit, the film takes the form of a musical revue, letting its story give way to elaborate stagings of Rodgers and Hart songs performed by the studio’s biggest stars. These alone make the movie worth watching, but the film’s cleaned-up version of Hart’s life doesn’t make sense even within the film’s sanitized world. The film makes him a cigar-chomping imp prone to fits of melancholy because he just can’t find the right girl, only hinting at his alcoholism and other self-destructive habits, all while depicting him as enthusiastically heterosexual. The choices are both historically inaccurate and dramatically nonsensical. In this, Words and Music was hardly an outlier. Night and Day, released two years earlier, makes similar omissions in the life of Cole Porter, for instance. 1941’s They Died With Their Boots On refashions George Custer into a hero worthy of its star, Errol Flynn. The Babe Ruth Story depicts the hard-living baseball hero as a bighearted, overgrown kid whose talents included the ability to heal sick children via athletic feats. And so on. A desire to valorize their subjects while coloring within the lines of the production code created the expectation that biopics weren’t to be trusted, no matter how entertaining they might be. The production code may have gone away, but the tradition never really died. It’s not hard to connect the dots between a golden-age tendency to glorify biopic subjects and, say, Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic of the band Queen that doesn’t pave over the tensions within the group but does repackage Freddie Mercury’s all-too-brief life as a feel-good story. That Bohemian Rhapsody was produced with the involvement of the band’s surviving members and doubles as a promotional film for Queen’s music is certainly no coincidence. Such licensed products—it’s difficult to make a music biopic if you don’t have the rights to use the music—have contributed to the biopic’s dubious reputation. That O’Shea Jackson Jr. plays his father, Ice Cube, in the perfectly good NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton (a film for which Cube and fellow NWA member Dr. Dre served as producers) suggests there’s a ceiling as to how unsparing the depiction will be, and sure enough it was swiftly criticized for omitting Dre’s history of abusing women. The light touch that the mostly dreadful Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black uses in depicting some of Winehouse’s family members and others in her orbit may help explain how the film got made, but it obscures any insights the film might offer about Winehouse’s life. But dismissing the biopic because of its worst examples (and Back to Black is at least in that conversation) is akin to dismissing the Western after watching a sleepy cowboy story on cable or dismissing horror movies after seeing the trailer for Amityville in Space. It means narrowing the definition to exclude every movie that doesn’t match a narrow, unflattering notion of what a biopic has to be and excluding examples that might improve the biopic’s reputation on technicalities. An attempt to define the genre while removing The Pride of the Yankees or Lawrence of Arabia or Raging Bull or Amadeus or, with apologies to Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer quickly starts to feel absurd. Whatever else they might be, are they not also biographical pictures? Which isn’t to say that biopics haven’t provided reasons to be wary over the years. Though most directly inspired by Ray and Walk the Line, the brilliant 2007 satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story—directed by Jake Kasdan, co-written by Kasdan and Judd Apatow—draws on decades of music biopic clichés to tell the story of a doofus rock legend as he thinks about his entire life before taking the stage for what will prove to be his final concert. The film’s so razor sharp in its satire it seems as if it should have put some of those clichés to rest. And yet they’ve persisted. I’m pretty sure when the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect reached the appropriate moment, I whispered to myself, “Goddammit, this is a dark fucking period!” Yet maybe even some of these clichés exist for a reason. And maybe, when done right, they still work. With apologies again to Nolan, it’s possible that Freud might have been at least partly right about the relationship between children and parents. The pretty good new Bruce Springsteen biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere breaks convention by focusing on a tight period in its subject’s life, the months Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) spent living in a rented house composing and recording his stripped-back 1982 album Nebraska. But writer-director Scott Cooper also uses flashbacks to Springsteen’s childhood depicting his difficult relationship with his mentally ill father Douglas (Stephen Graham) to draw direct lines between the album’s themes and Springsteen’s own mental health struggles. Is it a familiar biopic device? Sure. (At least, in Springsteen’s case, the wrong kid didn’t die.) But it also rings true—and just try not being moved by the film’s final scene between father and son. Made with its subject’s cooperation, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere might at heart be another example of a legacy act issuing a licensed product, albeit a better one than most. But if even the least-respected corner of the genre—the artist-approved music biopic—can produce a decent movie, isn’t that reason enough not to write off the biopic? It’s not as if movies about notable lives will stop being made, so why not opt for a big-tent definition that allows for a wider variety of films, from a solid by-the-book effort like King Richard to a gleefully anachronistic experiment like Marie Antoinette. Some will be great, some mediocre, and some downright laughable, but that’s true of any genre. They’ll all be biopics.
