Biopics: Does the Truth Matter?

As we head into the final months of 2023, it’s time for the time-honored tradition of awards season. From now until March, expect lots of actor schmoozing (SAG-AFTRA strike approved or otherwise), studio hype and capital-D Discourse. There are many parts of awards season that have become painfully familiar to us. There are genres of films and brands of performance that are as ingrained into this timeline as actor roundtables and pretending to care about the Golden Globes. The Academy’s tastes are so unchanging that there are movies we declare to be Oscar favorites from the moment they’re greenlit. Nothing exemplifies that predictability better than biopics.

To say that the Oscars love biopics feels like an understatement. They’re addicted to them, so quickly won over by this most middlebrow of genres and the staid structure of storytelling they offer. Acting in one certainly seems to be the easiest way to win a little gold man. Since 2000, 50 of the 115 performances nominated for Best Actor were for playing real people. This current season doesn’t seem like it’ll be short of competitors to add to those statistics. The current Best Actor frontrunners include Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, Colman Domingo in Rustin and Joaquin Phoenix in Napoleon. And that only scratches the surface of the biopic glut of 2023. Consider: Nyad, Priscilla, Ferrari, Freud’s Last Session, The Iron Claw, Air, Blackberry, One Life, Killers of the Flower Moon and Bob Marley: One Love.

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Dennis Bingham, who wrote extensively on the study of biopics, once described them as “a respectable genre of very low repute.” Essentially, the biopic is characterized by its narrative safety. These films generally don’t take risks, and when they do, they often stop being defined as a biopic. You know what you’re getting when you go to the cinema to see the latest glossy dramatization of the life of a singer you love, for example. Nobody leaves Rocketman surprised by what they saw. These are, generally speaking, stories for the masses. That’s not a bad thing. Many wonderful biopics have been made. Yet it’s tough to deny, especially in the past two decades or so, how the genre has been distilled into a gruel-like solution that sands away harsh truths in favor of corporate preservation. This usually means that the truth is smudged away, bit by bit.

The purpose of a biopic, generally speaking, isn’t to detail history as it actually happened. You’d be hard pressed to find an example of one that sticks to the documented truth without wavering (a rare exception to the rule would be David Fincher’s Zodiac, which is as close to reality as the director could get given the source material available). A lot of these changes are necessary for the basic act of narrativizing. Life doesn’t unfold in a three-act structure, after all. Frequently, events need to be condensed. Names changed. Complicated moments simplified. You need to give your actors that Oscar clip moment. And that’s all assuming that the sources available for the adaptation process are accurate. History is written by the victors, and biopics strengthen that resolve.

Sometimes, changes to history in biopics are pretty inconsequential. Other times, it feels like outright malpractice, such as Bohemian Rhapsody‘s grotesque decision to change around the timeline of Freddie Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis to motivate him to perform at Live Aid. In Nyad, Netflix’s take on swimmer Diana Nyad’s solo swim from Cuba to Florida, she is of course the heroic go-getter who does what no one else before her has, and at the age of 64. Like Bohemian Rhapsody, Nyad was made with the full cooperation of its living subjects. That means that the filmmakers were never going to be able to tackle the many doubts from the open water swimming community over whether or not Nyad actually succeeded (her swim has still never been formally ratified by any recognized marathon swimming organization).

This is often a problem that befalls biopics, typically those centered on musicians. In order to get the rights to the music, which is a key attraction to audiences, studios and directors must adhere to the demands of the people involved or the corporate entities who own their back catalogs. It’s easier to sell a soundtrack when you don’t portray the subject faithfully, even if their story is well-known. Note how Priscilla, which centers Elvis’ wife over the King himself, couldn’t get the rights to any of Presley’s music because Authentic Brands Group, which owns 85% of the Presley estate, said no to director Sofia Coppola.

As she told The Hollywood Reporter, “They don’t like projects that they haven’t originated, and they’re protective of their brand.” By contrast, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, made with total cooperation of ABG, used all of his music. It’s no coincidence that the latter film downplays Presley meeting Priscilla when she was 14, while Coppola’s film delves into the oft-deified singer’s darker side and mistreatment of his wife. In Elvis, Presley has little power. In Priscilla, his manipulations are far more evident. It’s not hard to see which narrative sells more records.

Many biopics have no interest in truth, often for fascinating reasons. Consider I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan film where six very different actors across lines of gender and race played the singer at various points in his career. Decades before that, Haynes told the story of Karen Carpenter through an unauthorized short that used dolls rather than humans, all the more effective to convey the late musician’s lack of autonomy during her life. Ken Russell’s film about composers like Liszt and Mahler embraced a kaleidoscopic approach to better convey the power of their music rather than detail their lives as expected. Such films eschew the biopic’s patterns in hopes of finding the truth of their subjects through something more visceral than a beat-for-beat documentation of their childhoods. Surely someone who has made themselves as deliberately unknowable as Bob Dylan is better understood through a film that embraces that element, rather than hopes to dissect it.

The matter of truth is no less prickly when dealing with subjects who have been dead for quite some time. Biopics such as Napoleon deal with eras of varying levels of historical documentation, and there’s far more leeway for storytellers to rearrange events and details for their own purposes. Do you portray Bonaparte’s battles as noble or genocidal? Is he a despot or a genius? Director Ridley Scott has never had much time for sticking to the facts if he feels the narrative could do better. The Last Duel, his best film in years, tackles a real-life event, but uses it more as a foundation for a wider examination of rape culture than as a copy-paste of centuries-old reports.

Generally speaking, audiences are more forgiving of such changes when they’re not emotionally or intellectually attached to the truth, and a few hundred years of distance always helps in this regard. Scott himself, when criticized by historians over seeming inaccuracies in the Napoleon trailer, responded succinctly: “Get a life.”

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, but it’s also frequently far more interesting. Bohemian Rhapsody greatly downplayed Mercury’s life (and his queerness) to more fully position him as a sad gay cautionary tale. The obvious issues and consequences of Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his adolescent cousin are distilled to a trite soap opera, and mean attack on the singer himself, in the abysmal Great Balls of Fire. Stardust managed the impossible by making David Bowie boring, so devoid of curiosity and vibrancy was its approach to a true icon. Capturing lightning in a bottle is half the challenge for a biopic, and if you fail, your audience will just wonder why they were ever supposed to care about this famous person in the first place.

Yet this feels somewhat inevitable when you stick to the rote and endlessly repeated conventions of the genre. They do not allow much room for true perception or challenges. Nor do the desires and demands of the current entertainment corporate machine want it to. The vast majority of modern biopics are brand extension exercises, designed to sell records or books or hologram tours. And they work as intended. Bohemian Rhapsody made over $900 million worldwide, won four Oscars and, according to Billboard, saw on-demand streams of Queen’s music triple in the six months following the movie’s release. What does truth matter when money talks louder?

The future of the biopic is an expected one, a path set on rails as thoroughly as the genre itself. There will always be exceptions, although films that deviate from the norm do so with such force that one wonders if they can even still be called biopics. For things to truly change, a celebrity or their estate will have to willingly give up creative control and allow a storyteller to actually tell the truth. That seems unlikely when there’s so much cash on the line. The game of fame is built on embracing the fun lie over the dark truth. Why should the biopic be any different?

Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.

How Much Does Truth Matter in Biopics?