SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It is award season, and like many years before, that means at least one biopic is in the mix of nominated films.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A COMPLETE UNKNOWN")
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: (As Bob Dylan) Two hundred people in that room, and each one wants me to be somebody else. They should just let me be.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Let you be what?
CHALAMET: (As Bob Dylan) Whatever it is they don't want me to be.
DETROW: That is Timothee Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan. Nominated for a Golden Globe best actor award, he is also considered a favorite to be nominated for an Oscar for his performance of Dylan during his early years in the folk music scene and his controversial decision to go electric.
Another biopic getting award buzz is the Netflix film "Maria," with Angelina Jolie starring as the famed opera singer Maria Callas.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MARIA")
KODI SMIT-MCPHEE: (As Mandrax) Tell me how it felt to be on stage.
ANGELINA JOLIE: (As Maria Callas) An exultation, an intoxication.
DETROW: Big stars playing iconic historical figures is, of course, Oscar bait. Think Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, Renee Zellweger as Judy Garland, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill and, of course, many, many, many others. So we wanted to dig into the appeal of biopics. What makes for good ones? What makes for bad ones? Why do they always become Oscar bait? We brought back in Marc Rivers, resident film fanatic here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Hey, Marc.
MARC RIVERS, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: Let's start with one of those. Like, why, every year, does it seem like there's 17 different biopics flashing across my screen?
RIVERS: I think with biopics, there's a kind of, like, air of importance around them, right?
DETROW: Yes.
RIVERS: When you're making a movie about Abraham Lincoln or you're making a movie about, you know, Leonard Bernstein, like, there's an air of importance around these movies and a seriousness of intent, right? You have to take this history seriously.
DETROW: Especially when it's, like, a big civil rights-type figure, right?
RIVERS: Totally.
DETROW: Like Harvey Milk. Like Gandhi. Like so many different examples.
RIVERS: Exactly. There's almost a kind of, like, moral imperative to, like, get this kind of history right.
DETROW: Right.
RIVERS: I think with musical biopics in particular, you think about how IP, or intellectual property, is so important these days, and what is Elvis, for instance, but, like, IP? You know, there's all this merchandise. You have clothes. You have the albums. You have museum exhibits. There's a built in-audience, you know. For the superhero movie, your son might like the new "Avengers" movie but you might not, right? But you and your son might like Bob Dylan. So your - the audience can span generations like a franchise movie, like a sequel. It's operating off the kind of built-in familiarity that you already have with the subject.
DETROW: I just want to put a clarification that we're using the phrase biopic here, not biopic.
RIVERS: Biopic, I'm going to stick with. Yeah.
DETROW: It is fair to say that when they're pulled off, a biopic can be an incredibly powerful movie. I'm thinking about - let's take, like, you know, the last few decades, "Malcolm X." I feel like this titanic movie.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MALCOLM X")
DENZEL WASHINGTON: (As Malcolm X) We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.
DETROW: In a very different way, the Steven Spielberg movie "Lincoln"...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LINCOLN")
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS: (As Abraham Lincoln) We're stepped out upon the world stage now - now - with the fate of human dignity in our hands.
DETROW: I feel like in two different ways, "Malcolm X" is the life story of this grand figure, and then "Lincoln" really zooms in, hones in on just one key moment - two examples of taking a serious topic, like you said, taking a different approach to them and making it work as a movie on its own. Agree? Disagree?
RIVERS: Definitely agree. I think it's interesting to have those two examples because on the one hand, you do have "Malcolm X" - it has this broad sweep, right? I think that can sometimes trip up other movies where it kind of feels like the movie is just kind of showing a Wikipedia page. It kind of...
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: It's just like - it looks like they're kind of putting a Wikipedia page onscreen - right? - where they're just kind of hitting all the important life events.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: I think the problem with a lot of other biopics is that they're hagiographies, right? Like, they are - they revere the subject. They're kind of putting a halo around the subject. There are always shots of other - kind of people are looking upon this person in awe, right?
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: And I think one thing this movie does - it forces you to empathize with Malcolm X. It's not just about his life. It's about the ideas that shaped his life. And nothing you see in the movie isn't shown to you that isn't a kind of a part of his ideological evolution. So by the end of the movie, you might not necessarily revere Malcolm X, but you can identify with and you can empathize with him.
And I think the lesson of that movie, too, is that experiencing the things that he did, maybe you, too, could have been Malcolm X. Any one of us could have been a Malcolm X. And I think of that coda towards the end that kind of goes outside the narrative, where Nelson Mandela is, like, in that classroom, and all those kids are standing up saying, I am Malcolm X, you know.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MALCOM X")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I'm Malcolm X.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) I'm Malcolm X.
RIVERS: So, like, it doesn't necessarily revere Malcolm X. It doesn't, but it empathizes with him. I think that's a key difference.
DETROW: There are also some very bad biopics out there (laughter), and...
RIVERS: Too many.
DETROW: ...Are there any warning signs for you of, like, this is a red flag in terms of the plot, in terms of the approach of the movie, in terms of, you know, like, the key beats of the movie?
RIVERS: Some of these tropes, particularly when it comes to musical biopics, are kind of so ingrained and well worn. I think you probably remember that parody that came out back in 07, "The Dewey Cox Story."
DETROW: "Walk Hard," yeah.
RIVERS: "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" - right? - where it just kind of made - it made fun of movies like "Ray" or "Walk The Line." It kind of hit those beats so aggressively and kind of - and so, like, unironically that it was just - it was just so easy to spoof.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Mr. Cox? Mr. Cox.
TIM MEADOWS: (As Sam) Give him a minute, son. Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life before he plays.
DETROW: Playing the historical figure, like we mentioned at the top - why do you think it's such a turbo boost to being in the mix for best actor or supporting actor?
RIVERS: I think with something, you know, subjective and also kind of hard to judge as acting, I think one thing that playing a real person does for, say, like, the Academy voters, they have something to compare the performance to. With something like Rami Malek and Freddie Mercury or Timothee Chalamet and Bob Dylan, they can say, well, all right - well, how good of a job he did, they can base that on just how well they copied a person they might already know. I think it's a very narrow way of, like, looking at performances. I think we need to expand what we think of when it comes to what is a great performance. It can't just be impersonation.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: You know, some of the best performances in movie history - they are performances that - of people that did not exist, you know?
DETROW: Yeah. Do you have an answer of most disappointing biopic you've ever seen, that you had really high hopes for and just fell - it fell flat to you?
RIVERS: I don't have an answer for that because I find most of them very cliched. I find most of them only kind of for the fans. And I think we need to have, like, a moratorium on biopics. I think we need to kind of take a break.
DETROW: If you could have a moratorium on superhero movies or biopics, and you only get one, what would it be?
RIVERS: Oh. You know, I'm going to say superhero movies because they're pushing out all the other types of movies. And I don't think biopics are pushing out other types of movies.
DETROW: OK.
RIVERS: But they both have kind of similar problems, and in a lot of ways, biopics are kind of superhero movies themselves. You know, someone like Lincoln is a real-life superhero in a lot of ways.
DETROW: What's another example of a biopic that you personally really like?
RIVERS: Well, speaking of Dylan, I think one biopic that I really appreciate is from 2007. It's Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There."
DETROW: Yeah. That was so interesting.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "I'M NOT THERE")
CATE BLANCHETT: (As Jude) You know, I didn't come out of some cereal box. There's no one out there who's ever going to be converted by a song. There's no Phil Ochs song that's going to keep a movement moving or a picket line picketing. His songs are acts of personal conscience.
RIVERS: And I think what makes it so interesting is that it's not really a biopic at all. It's kind of an anti-biopic.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: You know, I think what Haynes does in the movie is he kind of has multiple actors that play different Bob Dylan personas, one of which is a young Black kid, another one of them played by Cate Blanchett, who plays a kind of electric Dylan. That allows him to create this kind of broader commentary on Bob Dylan, as the movie is less about Bob Dylan the person than it is about Bob Dylan the mythology, Bob Dylan the legend. I mean, obviously, Bob Dylan itself, like, is an invention. That's not even his real name, right? So I think the movie gets into how Bob Dylan is kind of a hodgepodge of all these different American idioms, right? Like he's just - like, he himself is an American invention.
And the movie kind of interrogates that idea of this kind of, like, self-invention, of transforming and mutations - that, like, the Bob Dylan of the early '60s is not the same as the Bob Dylan in the later '60s and '70s. So I think that movie kind of gets closer to what Bob Dylan has meant to America and, you know, meant to the culture than kind of a straight-up more conventional biopic would do.
DETROW: That is NPR producer Marc Rivers. Marc, thanks so much.
RIVERS: Thanks, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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