The Anti-Biopic: On Refusing the Cradle-to-Grave Shape
The biopic is a genre with a default structure, and the default is almost always the problem. An argument for the biographical films that refuse the shape.
6 pieces
The biopic is a genre with a default structure, and the default is almost always the problem. An argument for the biographical films that refuse the shape.

A year after James Mangold's Dylan biopic arrived in the middle of a tired genre, the film's decisions keep looking smarter. An argument for the underrated music biopic of the decade.
The contemporary biopic has adopted a specific form that functions as reputation management. An essay on the mechanism by which the biopic launders its subjects, and what the occasional exception does differently.

Pablo Larraín's third and probably final entry in his trilogy of distressed-woman biopics is the most formally certain of the three, and the one least willing to flatter its subject.

Michael Gracey's Robbie Williams biopic cast its subject as a CGI chimpanzee and posted one of the worst wide-opening results of the year. The film is still better than its box office.
Morgan Neville's LEGO-animated Pharrell Williams biography arrived in October 2024 as a formal provocation: a documentary rendered in plastic bricks. The film solves a specific genre problem, and creates a different one.