The Anti-Biopic: On Refusing the Cradle-to-Grave Shape

The biopic is one of the most structurally deficient genres in American cinema. I say this as someone who has watched hundreds of them across a career of film-watching, in many cases enjoying individual scenes, occasionally admiring individual performances, and almost never finding a complete film I would defend as a serious piece of work. The genre’s default structure is broken, and the films that succeed inside the genre succeed by refusing the default structure.

Let me name the default structure. The cradle-to-grave biopic takes a notable life, identifies between six and twelve “key” events across that life, and depicts each event at roughly proportional length. Childhood trauma. Early recognition of talent. First breakthrough. Romantic life. Professional peak. Personal crisis. Public decline. Reconciliation or death. Credits over archival footage.

You have seen this film. You have seen it about Queen (Bohemian Rhapsody), about Elton John (Rocketman), about Freddie Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody again), about Judy Garland, about Edith Piaf, about Abraham Lincoln, about Winston Churchill, about Margaret Thatcher, about Steve Jobs (twice, in two different sub-structures), about Hemingway (television), about Aretha Franklin, about Billie Holiday. Each of these films has specific virtues. None of them, I would argue, are finally good films, and the reason is the default structure.

Why the structure fails

A human life, in the biographical register, has certain recurring shapes. Birth, education, first professional engagements, the work that matters, the complications of the work, the decline, the death. The biopic’s default structure reproduces these shapes because they are the structures the subject’s actual life had. This is, in principle, honest.

The problem is that cinematic drama operates on different principles from biographical truth. Drama requires a specific shape: a protagonist with a specific desire, an obstacle or set of obstacles, a series of decisions that illuminate character, a resolution that clarifies the protagonist’s moral position. Most lives do not produce this shape. Most lives, viewed across their full duration, are a series of overlapping projects, partially-realised desires, digressions, recoveries, and slow gradual changes that do not dramatise well.

When the biopic tries to reproduce a full life, it has to flatten the life into a series of dramatic beats, each selected and compressed to approximate a dramatic arc. The flattening is the problem. The specific textures of an actual life (the habits, the domestic rhythms, the pattern of how decisions actually get made) are the things that distinguish one life from another. Cradle-to-grave structure removes those textures in service of the dramatic beat.

What the successful biographical films do instead

The biographical films I am willing to defend, across the last decade, all refuse the cradle-to-grave shape. They do this in specific ways.

They narrow the timeframe. A Complete Unknown (2024), James Mangold’s Bob Dylan film, covers four years (1961 to 1965). Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023) covers roughly a decade of a specific relationship. Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016) covers a week. Lincoln (Spielberg, 2012) covers four months. Each of these films refuses to tell its subject’s whole life, and in refusing, they create space for the specific texture of the period they have chosen.

They focus on a specific relationship rather than a career. Priscilla is not “Priscilla Presley’s life.” It is the Elvis-Priscilla relationship, examined from her perspective. The specific domestic dynamic is the subject, not the larger arc of either of their careers. This is a specific biographical discipline that most biopics ignore.

They refuse the moral clarity. Jackie does not tell us what to think about Jacqueline Kennedy. A Complete Unknown does not tell us whether Bob Dylan’s Newport electric pivot was right or wrong. These films offer their subjects as specifically ambiguous, and the ambiguity is the point.

They are willing to be formally strange. Pain and Glory (Almodóvar, 2019), which is autobiographical rather than biographical but operates in an adjacent mode, uses memory-structure in ways that refuse linear progression. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007), the prior Dylan film, splits the subject across six actors playing different phases. These are specifically cinematic decisions that the default biopic structure does not permit.

The specific case of A Complete Unknown

I wrote elsewhere about A Complete Unknown at greater length. I want to return to it here because it is the specific recent biopic whose success most clearly illustrates the anti-biopic thesis.

The film covers four years. It does not show Dylan’s childhood. It does not show his later career. It does not explain what happens next. The four years it does cover are covered in specific, granular detail: who Dylan was sleeping with, what rooms he was in, what he was reading, who he was learning from, what it looked like when a specific song was first performed in public.

This is a biographical film about the specific experience of being twenty-one years old in Greenwich Village in 1961, and the specific experience of not being twenty-one anymore in Forest Hills in 1965. The film refuses the larger arc that Dylan’s life later generated, and the refusal is what lets the film be specifically about the years it depicts.

A cradle-to-grave Bob Dylan would have had to include the motorcycle accident, the Christian phase, the never-ending tour, the Nobel Prize. Each of these would have received five minutes of running time. None of them would have landed. The specific virtues of A Complete Unknown come from the specific moments it is willing to sit inside.

What this argues for

The anti-biopic is not a rejection of biographical cinema. It is a specific set of disciplines that biographical films adopt to produce better results than the default genre structure would generate.

If you are making a biographical film, you have choices: narrow the timeframe, focus on a specific relationship rather than a career, refuse the moral clarity, be willing to be formally strange. Every one of these choices is a constraint. Constraints produce better art than defaults do.

The biopic, as a genre, will continue to produce cradle-to-grave films. They will continue to collect Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress. They will continue to be forgotten within a decade.

The films that survive will be the ones that refused the shape.