Elvis Presley biopic is a failure…Is there a jinx on musical biopics?

There are at least five major filmmakers in India, not all of them from Bollywood, who desire to make a film on Lata Mangeshkar . I hope it never happens.

When was the last time we saw a truly inspired biopic on a legendary musical figure?

If you wrack your brains you might come up with What’s Love Got To Do With It , the Tina Turner biopic. But really, we are stretching it. In all honesty, did Angela Bassett playing Tina actually do justice to Tina Turner’s life and music? Perhaps the lives of the truly great should not be tampered with? At least, not musicians.

Look at what the great Baz Luhrmann has done to Elvis Presley ! There is nothing wrong with the telling of the musical legend’s stormy life story: the drama, songs, love, sex, scandals…they are all there.

I am not too sure Austin Butler is the perfect fit for the part. Having seen the young American actor’s earlier works and more importantly, having seen Kurt Russell play Elvis in a 1979 television film directed by John Carpenter, I can safely say Luhrmann could have chosen better.

However as far as the murder of Elvis Presley saga is concerned, it would not be fair to say that Butler did it. There are many crucial factors at work in Elvis to bring down the biopic’s intended intensity. The volume of passion is seriously compromised by the absence of a heart, a core, a centre without which there is no dramatic conflict, just a gallery of flamboyantly staged musical numbers where Butler tries to behave like Elvis.

But it is not a completely lost cause. Austin Butler as Elvis is better than Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury , Taron Egerton as Elton John and Johnny Flynn as David Bowie . These three recent mega-biopics on musical legends failed to capture the essence of their subject.

Bryan Singer ’s Bohemian Rhapsody is a deeply flawed biopic on a deeply flawed, though monstrously gifted musician-singer-composer Freddie Mercury, who changed the way we looked at Rock music. Troubled by production glitches right through, this fitful flick succeeds in making Freddie look sassy and campy without flipping his music into the conundrum of eccentricity.

Come to think of it, there is nothing really wrong with this bird’s eye view of life that defied deviant deification. It ticks all the boxes in the biopic genre, offends no one seriously and defends none either.

Rami Malek as Freddie is everything you expect him to be: toothy-mouthed, wild-haired, unisex clothed and girlie gaited… It’s all there. But then again, this is not Freddie Mercury. This is Freddie according to Malek.

If director Gabriel Range’s Stardust is to be believed then David Bowie for all his flashy androgynous clothes and acts, was a bore at his core. The film slices off one episode from Bowie’s life with a blunt knife that leaves many uneven edges in the storytelling canvas. Who was David Bowie? Stardust is just one of a quartet of recent biopics on rock-pop icons three of them bi-sexual, that falls flat on its face even while negotiating rocky craggy pathways in trying to get to the core of the icon.

What made the music of these rock legends such monumental musical thrusts into eternity, so enduring and popular that even today their songs play in our heads and beds? At the end of the films on their lives, we are none the wiser.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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