Musical Biopics
A Complete Unknown and Love & Mercy
By Alan Herrmann
MOVIE CRITIC
I love music of all kinds, with some limitations. I’m not a big fan of musicals. Breaking into song in the middle of a story, particularly during a dramatic scene, asks me to suspend too much disbelief. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I steer clear of this genre even though I love music and I love film biographies about musicians.
Musical film biographies vary in style, purpose, and attention to accuracy. Many of the biographies from the 40s and 50s tend to exaggerate the lives of musicians and composers for dramatic effect by including fictional or partly fictional romances or personal tragedies.
The Cole Porter bio-film Night and Day with Cary Grant, and Rhapsody in Blue with Robert Alda as George Gershwin, are good examples of movies that played fast and loose with the facts.
Both men, who contributed so much to the great American songbook, were canonized by Hollywood. The Porter film was nearly all fiction, concocted by the studio as a musical to showcase his hit songs, not trouble with facts.
Since then, musical biopics have gone in various directions, and in more recent years have embraced the truth, even in the guise of fantasy, as in Rocket Man, about the life of Elton John.
I recently saw A Complete Unknown, a film about Bob Dylan’s early years in New York to his iconic performance at the Newport Folk Festival. I expected to enjoy the film, but did not have high expectations for authentic detail. As it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised, from the look of early 60s’ New York, to the spot-on performances by Timothee Chalamet as Dylan, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. Chalamet has softer features than Dylan, arguably more handsome, but about ten minutes into the movie, Chalamet’s mannerisms, clothes, and voice – both speaking and singing – convinced me this was the right guy to play Bob Dylan.
He captures the evolving persona of Dylan from the shy, new kid in town to the cryptic, controversial music icon who helped create folk rock by going electric at Newport.
Norton’s portrayal of Seeger is flawless. He bears a close physical resemblance to the folk legend, and the particular calm cadence of his voice. Barbaro’s Baez is also very good, particularly in scenes where she and Chalamet perform together, and when they’re exchanging barbs as romantic partners.
The music, of course, is extraordinary and plentiful, most likely because the film wasn’t plagued by copyright restrictions like many biopics. The performances are real, not dubbed, so the coffeehouse and concert scenes are organic and not overblown.
My favorite scene comes near the end as Dylan takes the stage at Newport, wearing his iconic shades and wielding a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. As traditional folk fans begin to jeer at the audacity of electric instruments being used, musician Al Kooper’s organ opens the first notes of “Like a Rolling Stone” with electric guitars and bass filling in. It doesn’t take long before the boos are forced to compete with positive cries from other fans who embrace the rock and roll edginess of the song. It was a risk, but in the long run, it paid off.
Love & Mercy (2014) is easily one of my favorite musical biographies. The story of Brian Wilson, the genius of the Beach Boys who struggled with mental illness for decades, is told with two different actors playing him in different time periods. John Cusack plays the older Wilson in the late 80s and early 90s when he was under the unscrupulous care of Dr. Eugene Landy, played brilliantly by Paul Giamatti.
Paul Dano portrays Wilson during the 60s when the Beach Boys were one of the most popular musical groups in the world. It’s also when Wilson would create their most critically acclaimed album, Pet Sounds, while signs of his mental illness began to manifest. The movie isn’t linear, it goes back and forth between the younger and older Wilson, making it feel like two different films. But it’s not confusing and this structure works well.
The heartbreaking scenes, with Cusack’s heavily medicated Wilson being treated like a child by Landy, are buffered by the presence of Melinda Ledbetter, – played by Elizabeth Banks in probably her best role – the woman who helps Wilson break free from Landy’s tyranny. She eventually marries Wilson, and they remained together until her death in 2024.
My favorite scenes in Love & Mercy are when Wilson is working with the studio musicians on Pet Sounds. Here Dano’s Wilson eagerly tries out various sounds and techniques that are quite alien to pop music at the time. The studio musicians appear delighted with the use of classical instruments melding with electronics and more traditional instruments. Although Good Vibrations was released after Pet Sounds, the use of heavy bass, cellos, and the spacey sounding theremin, would solidify Brian Wilson’s ability to cross pop, orchestral, and rock music.
The members of the Beach Boys take longer to come around, feeling the music is risky and moves them farther away from their surfer California sound. But Wilson wins out, proclaiming the need to come up with something as unique as the Beatle’s Rubber Soul. The friendly competition continued with the Beatles’ release of Revolver and the mind-blowing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which they claim was directly influenced by Pet Sounds.
Both A Complete Unknown and Love & Mercy share similar themes of musicians facing adversity in their quest to forge ahead in an industry that often rewards sameness. Dylan kept evolving as an artist who didn’t forget his folk routes but wasn’t afraid to challenge orthodoxy by including other influences such as rock, country, and blues. Wilson, who faced even more challenges due to his mental health and family pressures, would still produce great music for the Beach Boys and as a solo artist.
Here is a quick list of some of my other favorite musical biopics:
Amadeus (1984), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Bird (1988), Charlie Parker
Walk the Line (2005), Johnny Cash
Backbeat (1994), The Beatles
Immortal Beloved (1994), Ludwig van Beethoven
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