I used to believe that Walk Hard, Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow’s pitch-perfect parody of movies like Ray and Walk the Line, should have killed the conventional musical biopic. How could it possibly keep lumbering on in the face of a comedy that lanced its tropes with such gleeful accuracy, from the tyrannical dads to the backstage flashbacks to the implication that so many iconic artists conveniently lived their lives according to the same three-act structure? What I failed to appreciate is how much the formula is a feature, not a bug, for fans of those films, including those who helped push the hokum that was Bohemian Rhapsody to over $900 million at the box office. Sure, you can break with convention, zoom in on unexpected time frames, and portray someone as an opportunist as well as a genius. But there’s always going to be a market for reassuring familiarity — a run-through of someone’s greatest hits to a rhythm of rise, fall, and redemption, touching on the darker stuff only on the way to a triumphant close. The funny thing about Michael, the new movie about Michael Jackson produced by BoRhap’s Graham King and the late star’s estate, is that it hardly does that.
