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The Unfortunate Problem With Biopics (Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman)
Jul 7, 2025
Biopics have been a staple of cinema for decades, bringing the lives of extraordinary real people to the silver screen. From Ali and A Beautiful Mind to Lincoln and Chaplin, these films attempt to blend historical accuracy with compelling storytelling. But in recent years, the biopic genre has faced a growing issue—how much should truth be sacrificed for entertainment?
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0:00
My name is Elton Hercules John
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He's about to tell the audience he's an alcoholic, a cocaine addict, a sex addict
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a bulimic, and a shopaholic that has problems with weed, prescription drugs, and anger management
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It's a stunningly honest way to begin a movie about a real person. And knowing a movie is about a real person can definitely add some dramatic weight to
0:20
the proceedings. At the same time, life doesn't necessarily happen in the kinds of character arcs
0:25
that movie storytelling requires. You're going to have to give him a moment, son
0:29
Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life before he plays
0:33
And that's a problem for biopics. The film industry has been making biopics almost as long as it's been making films
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At just 18 seconds, Thomas Edison's 1895 short, The Execution of Mary Stewart
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is probably too brief to qualify as the first one, but it still goes to show how early on
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filmmakers were using their medium to depict well-known people. Ever since then, Hollywood has regularly made movies about the lives and careers of the rich
0:58
famous, infamous, or otherwise noteworthy. The trappings of the genre have also been used to create quasi-biographical films like
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Gus Van Sant's Last Days and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which reinvented cinematic language
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and is very possibly the single most revered and influential film of all time
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Biopics are also generally reliable at the box office. The highest-grossing recent examples, which include movies like Bohemian Rhapsody
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American Sniper, The Greatest Showman, The King's Speech, The Wolf of Wall Street
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and Rocketman have sold billions of dollars in tickets, and the genre has remained consistently
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popular with audiences for decades. But from a screenwriting perspective, biopics are hard
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Even picking a story structure can be tricky. Filmmakers generally have a choice between two
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forms. The first is what's sometimes called a snapshot bio. Snapshot bios like 2012's Lincoln
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cover a relatively narrow, but presumably definitive, slice of the subject's life
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The alternative is the conventional biopic model. Conventional biopics, like 2004's Ray
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take place over the course of decades and attempt to mimic the ups and downs
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of a real person entire life The snapshot model has the advantage of being structured more like a regular movie It tells a singular story about an event that changes its protagonist forever but to do so it has to omit most of its subject experiences so it doesn give audiences the real scope of
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that person's life. On the other hand, the conventional model covers decades. That means
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it can capture everything, but it comes with other problems, not least of which is that a lot of them
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feel alike. You've definitely seen this kind of movie. We get a glimpse of an artist discovering
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their talent. Often, when they're still a child, we see them fight their way into the music business
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and write their early hits. They play now-famous concerts and rise to the top of the charts
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and along the way, they fall in love, battle personal and professional demons
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and often slug it out with some form of addiction. These beats underlie too many beloved biopics to count. On the other hand
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they're also at the heart of a lot of duds. That's because not only does a movie that takes
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the conventional path have to succeed in telling the basic arc, it also has to somehow find a way
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to add an original flavor and sense of genuine emotion to that arc. And in a world that's seen
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effective spoofs of the genre like 2007's Walk Hard, the Dewey Cox story, and 2022's Weird
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the Al Yankovic story, that ain't easy. You're all just a bunch of normals. Okay
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I'm the weird one. I am the weird one. So how does a biopic zoom far enough out to see a person's
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whole life while still conveying a meaningful, intimate, and original feeling portrait of a
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well-known person. It's instructive to compare 2018's Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody
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to 2019's Elton John biopic Rocketman. Both movies introduce us to pre-fame versions of
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their respective subjects that give us a look at their relationships to their families. Both
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eventually get discovered, write hit songs, and conquer the rock and roll world. These superficially
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similar flicks were released within about six months of one another. Bohemian Rhapsody made $900 million at the box office and won four Academy Awards, while
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Rocketman went on to make $200 million and scored one Academy Award
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So by those measures it hard to argue Bohemian Rhapsody did anything wrong And due to a whole lot of behind drama we not going to get into here Rocketman director Dexter Fletcher wound up taking over directing duties on Bohemian Rhapsody
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from original director Bryan Singer. Fletcher directed what he estimates to be about a third of the film
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so even though he's not credited as a director on The Queen Pick, he's definitely an author of both movies
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But while Rocketman was lauded by critics, Bohemian Rhapsody drew mostly lukewarm reviews
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and in the years since its Oscar wins, Bohemian Rhapsody has increasingly become something of an internet punching bag
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while Rocketman has only continued to grow in reputation. Rocketman just did a better job
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telling its rise-fall-redemption story. This is greatly because the movie turned out to be such a
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surprisingly frank character study, something that was apparently done at the request of the
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rocker himself, who is on record saying, my life can't be sugar-coated, and I didn't want it to be
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The warts-and-all approach showed John's traumatic childhood. When are you going to hug me
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Don't be soft. Where he got his talent and drive from, his failings as a young man
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his triumphs as a musician, his addictions, and his love life. In being more honest about its subject's low points
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the redemption at the end of the film felt more earned, emotional, and meaningful
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In contrast, Bohemian Rhapsody has been accused of cleaning up Mercury's life
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to make for a more mainstream movie-going experience. The result is that we never feel like we know Freddy as well as we know the Elton
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of Rocketman. We never delve as deeply into his dark side, so his redemption doesn't really
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emotionally register as much. The movie ends up feeling like a flat, soulless highlights reel of
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events from Freddie Mercury's life, albeit once scored from some of the greatest rock songs in
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history. Rocketman figured out how to stand out from the conventional biopic pack. It did this by
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being truly told from its main character's perspective. The relatively trippy production
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let Elton's view of his own life shape the movie in fantastical, reality-bending ways
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And John's flamboyant sense of style is built right into its production design
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It's a brilliant use of visual storytelling that helps to more deeply connect the audience to the man
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By comparison Bohemian Rhapsody is as straightforward and realist as they come which isn inherently bad but doesn do much in the way of helping a film stand out either Rami Malek certainly resembles Mercury to some
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extent, and the recreations of Queen's Live Aid performance are nothing short of brilliant. But
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otherwise, the film does little to use its visual style to aid in the development of its main
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character. Same goes for the use of music, where Bohemian Rhapsody again opts for a very
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unconventional approach. Queen's music is mostly included diegetically in rehearsals, concerts, and on the radio, and it's often used in service of scenes lazily enacting how those songs were
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written and recorded. Rocketman's use of music, on the other hand, is completely character-driven
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The film is a jukebox musical that repurposes Elton John's songs to help tell the story itself
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The rocker's most recognizable hits, as sung by the cast, are woven right into the fabric of the
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tale. When a 10-year-old Elton roars into The is Back, it doesn't tell you much about the
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song, but it tells you a ton about the character of the kid singing it, despite using the conventional
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biopic formula. Rocketman never feels formulaic because it uses the unvarnished truth to make its
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arc land powerfully. Bohemian Rhapsody, in contrast, barely scratches the surface of Freddie Mercury
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and the ultimate effect is like watching the filmic equivalent of a Wikipedia article
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One of the A&R men from EMI saw us recording, gave our demo to John Reed
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He looks after Elton John. But taking a step back from these specific movies, we see biopics because we want the
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chance to feel like we know the people who shape our world
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And when done well, biographical films can create an emotionally rich experience that
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allows audiences a far deeper understanding of a person's real-life journey than any mere
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list of facts could ever give them. Being based on real-life events doesn't invalidate an audience's fundamental desire
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to see a story's protagonist face significant conflicts, fail, grow, and come out a changed
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person on the other side. The complexity of real life has to be balanced against the dramatic needs of a screenplay
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while still conveying a meaningful portrait of the real person at the heart of the story
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It's like we said, biopics are hard
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