Biopics that rock

This year’s Oscar race is shaping up as a battle between issue-oriented films – gay power (Brokeback Mountain) vs. the role of media (Good Night and Good Luck, Capote) vs. terrorism (Munich) vs. ethnic tension (Crash). Lost in the shuffle was the musical biography Walk the Line, which won lots of praise for its two stars, Joaquin Phoenix (playing singer Johnny Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (as singer June Carter), but no "Best Film" nod.

That’s okay, because music biopics are a spotty film genre at best, despite the high praise for last year’s Ray and Walk the Line. They usually fall short of matching up to the power of the music, or explaining the mythic aura of the musician.

The problem may be finding a dramatic arc in a musician’s life. To do this, it’s often necessary to wait until they’re old enough (and venerated enough) to provide the arc themselves (through revisionist autobiographies, usually). As is often the case, however, the musician has the misfortune to die too young to provide a meaningful story arc. This is especially true with rock stars.

Walk the Line – as with Taylor Hackford’s Oscar-nominated Ray – purports to show how a poor Southern boy with musical talent overcomes hurdles (drug addiction, guilt about loss of brother, marital infidelity) to attain musical triumph. It’s an oft-told tale, and we can hark back to What’s Love Got to Do With It, the 1994 Tina Turner biopic starring the muscular Angela Bassett, to spot a forebear of this particularly hot genre. In it, Turner overcomes her addictive and self-destructive relationship to abusive husband/musician Ike Turner. By the end, she stands tall and proud on her own – a rock-and-roll survivor.

Rock biopics often try to locate tales of redemption in a musical form overflowing with demons and temptations. Drugs usually play a key role, and a grueling "withdrawal" scene is mandatory in most rock biopics – Ray Charles going cold turkey in Ray; Cash writhing on a bed in Walk the Line after they take away his amphetamines.

To be sure, there’s no absence of demons in the rock world. "We’re all going to hell, you realize that, right?" Jerry Lee Lewis’s character informs his rockabilly pals in Walk the Line. Indeed, finding a moral recovery in a rock musician’s life may be like trying to find WMDs in Iraq. It takes a lot of fudging.

Finding musical salvation is somewhat easier. In Ray, we see Charles’ music grow and evolve, as he becomes the musical "genius" his record label had always promoted him to be. In the process, he is also shown to be quite a bastard, and the film suggests Ray had to "kick" a lot of things – drugs, selfishness, guilt over his brother’s death – before standing tall as a musical legend. Real life, of course, is a bit less cut-and-dried.

In Walk the Line, Johnny Cash’s music doesn’t really evolve all that much. Early on, he emerges more or less fully formed as "The Man in Black," and so the film must develop a different dramatic tension – focusing on his troubled love for June Carter, how it consumed him and eventually redeemed him. As movie arcs go, it’s not a bad approach, allowing us to see Cash and Carter’s music intertwine and their relationship grow. Some critics, interestingly, have labeled the heterosexual love story in Walk the Line as sappy, while singing nothing but hosannas for the cowboy romance in Brokeback Mountain. You may draw your own conclusions.

There are other species of rock biopic, of course, offering different avenues for metaphor and expression. Postmodern rock retellings have included Michael Winterbottom’s 24-Hour Party People, a look at the rise and fall of two Manchester bands – Joy Division and Happy Mondays – which is more a meditation on fame and the historical moment than a genuine biopic. Then there’s Velvet Goldmine – a glitzy gloss on the relationship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop, though ultimately it’s a personal fantasy tale by director Todd Haynes, not a biopic per se.

More plentiful are tales of rock doom and destruction, and these include Oliver Stone’s The Doors, Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy and last year’s Gus Van Sant film Last Days, which featured a stooping, bearded Michael Pitt doing his best Kurt Cobain, mumbling and shuffling his way toward a final shotgun blast. Try finding redemption in that.

The Doors and Sid and Nancy are more typical, but also unique in their own ways. Stone’s movie triggered his "hallucinatory" filmmaking phase, as he focused his woozy lens on rock star Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer, whose acting has never recovered) all the way to the final Paris bathtub demise. Sid and Nancy is almost the flip side of Walk the Line, showing how love can be so singularly self-consuming that it causes lovers to implode and die. "Ring of Fire," indeed.

Another tale of destruction comes in Bird, which features a haunted performance by Forrest Whitaker as the dead-at-30 alto sax player Charlie Parker who revolutionized jazz through intricate solos later termed "bebop." Bird was an unredeemed junkie, and his imminent destruction is telegraphed from his first slurring onscreen appearance.

Then there was Dennis Quaid’s take on Jerry Lee Lewis and his affinity for a teenage girl who happened to be his cousin in Great Balls of Fire; and of course, the rock tragedy biopics – two of them focusing on victims of the plane crash that took rock and rollers Buddy Holly and Richie Valens (The Buddy Holly Story and La Bamba, respectively). No biopic is scheduled as of yet for the one-hit Big Bopper, who also perished in the 1957 crash.

I combed through my material, and found no definitive biopics on either Elvis Presley or John Lennon – two rock casualties who met with unpleasant and relatively young deaths. There was, of course, Backbeat, which starred Ian Hart as the young and acerbic Lennon during the Beatles’ Hamburg club days. An earlier "test run" for Backbeat can be seen in the short feature called The Hours and Times, which also had Hart doing a remarkable impersonation of Lennon during his trip to Spain with manager Brian Epstein.

No credible biopic of Elvis has been done, possibly because he, like Lennon, is too big a subject for a single movie. Backbeat and Hours and Times instead show us glimpses of Lennon at specific "key" moments of his life, but are not biopics per se. Elvis makes phantom appearances in countless films (among them Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train), but has never gotten the full-on, big-screen biopic treatment.

It could be that subjects like Lennon and Elvis are just too larger-than-life for the often lethal "epic" biopic. Like a number of musical and Hollywood legends, the charisma of Lennon and Presley is perhaps too ephemeral for any actor to truly capture. Best to go to the source – to the music – for the real truth.