When it comes to historical biopics, especially the ones about famous musicians, there are a lot of stinkers. Maybe the greatness of the music alone is enough of a crutch to get even the most mediocre of these films made — and, look, the music in Bohemian Rhapsody is the best part of that movie — but at a certain point these movies became awkward star vehicles for actors to chase award nominations, with plots lifted straight from their Wikipedia pages, and not much else.
Still, in even the dullest genre there are some standouts, and there are plenty of biopics about musicians we know and love that are great. Even aside from the music, which is always guaranteed to be a good enough reason to at least get a ticket, the really good examples of this kind of movie give something new to the biopic format. Maybe they focus on an unexpected aspect of this person’s life. Maybe they’re told from the perspective of an antagonist. Maybe they take a chopped and screwed approach to history, finding new angles to dramatize familiar subjects.
This list does stretch the meaning of “biopic” a little: a few movies on here aren’t the full narrative of a person’s life, but rather some small part of it blown out to cinematic scale. They’re all really good, though, and have kept the genre from descending purely into Oscar-bait slop. (The only reason we left out Walk Hard, arguably the best musician-centric biopic ever made, is due to the inescapable fact that Dewey Cox is, sadly, not real.)
10 Musical Biopics That Are Actually Great
These movies are almost as good as the music they’re about.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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