Music biopics have become a tired, overdone sub-genre over the past few years, often with no amount of imagination beyond just a greatest hits collection of an artist’s best songs. Films like Back to Black or Bob Marley: One Love offer some incredibly half-hearted storytelling in favour of stumbling onto the next song and hoping that will make the audience forget they are unable to competently make a proper film that stands on its own two feet. In fact, Back to Black is probably the worst offender of this, making a narrative that hardly makes any sense thanks to its awful structure and editing. Amy Winehouse’s songs are obviously fantastic, and they sound mostly good in that film, but that is not the merit of the film itself by any stretch. If anything, those songs are made worse by being remade in a more processed and less raw manner, so who that film was actually made for, we will never know. It was only a matter of time until the biopic treatment came to the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, a figure larger than life and definitely the biggest star they could have chosen to make a film about. Not only does this film suffer from a number of the problems biopics have had for the past few years, but its biggest crime is that it fails to give us any sort of grounded look at such a huge figure, one that is not superficial and maturely confronts the problems the artist had. A Complete Unknown is an outlier in the music biopic sub-genre because it puts filmmaking first, but most of all, it grounds Bob Dylan and praises him while also being very damning of him all the same. Michael shows us the King of Pop, but overwhelmingly so in a way that feels inauthentic and fake, especially when he has had a fair amount of controversy. The result is a constant, fatiguing session of bootlicking and a failure to show a proper human side of a massive figure that would be incredibly interesting to see brought down to earth.

Michael follows the life and earlier career of Michael Jackson, one of the biggest and most influential pop stars of all time. Portrayed predominantly by his nephew Jafar Jackson, this film spans Jackson’s early days in the Jackson 5 up until the 1988 tour of his ‘Bad!’ album. Starting from the Jackson family’s small home in Gary, Indiana, the film portrays their very quick rise to fame, generally down to Joe Jackson’s (Colman Domingo) oppressive and violent obsession with getting his boys to escape the monotonous and boring life he and his wife lead. He beats them with a belt for getting things wrong in their rehearsals and is a strict perfectionist, though claiming he is only doing it for their own good. Their rapid family change from their small, quaint house to a large mansion also sees a change in the dynamic of the family. Joe raves about the ‘Jackson brand’ acting as a manager for the family and essentially removing himself as a father to serve that purpose. But Michael does not want to be ruled under his father’s thumb. He wants to ‘spread his light’ as his mother has told him to all his life. This film shows Michael taking his life by the horns and going his own way, making his first solo album and propelling himself into stardom that people could only dream of.

You do not need me to tell you that Michael Jackson had great songs and was one of the best performers of his day; nobody needs to tell you that because it’s just a widely-agreed truth. The thing I like about this film is those concert moments, music booming, pyrotechnics spraying, and Jackson doing his thing. They are shot relatively well, and they give a similar feeling evocative of watching some old videos of his performances back in the day. Still, other than those scenes’ composition, they offer no more than just showing you a great song that this film had no creative process in making. It is not the merit of the film to enjoy ‘Thriller’ being portrayed on screen, especially when the music video sequence of them shooting it is largely shot-for-shot and essentially is a slightly less good version of the original. What this film does deliver outside of these sequences is so lacklustre and completely surface-level, with absolutely nothing interesting to say. It hardly even functions as a film, having fleeting moments of characterisation and development, but ultimately never fully committing to them and exploring them properly. The only narrative throughline is Michael trying to break out from under his father and go his own way, and that is it. What’s more disappointing is that some interesting tidbits could have been incredibly effective had they been explored properly. When Michael gets his nose job, due to being frequently called ‘big nose’, he says that he needs and wants to be perfect. Everybody in the whole film is praising him and saying how perfect he is, but the idea that he himself does not think so would be a great thread to explore, especially considering how much plastic surgery we know he got later on in life. Instead, he just says this in the film, and it is never mentioned by him again. Everybody continues to fawn over him and tell him he is the greatest, and it gets old very fast. As mentioned, this is the fundamental problem with this film. Failing to tackle such a colossal presence, reining him in, and seeing a more human side of him as opposed to just seeing the side everybody has seen before, but also brushing any criticism under the rug entirely. Nobody is perfect, not even Michael Jackson, and telling me fifty times is not going to make me believe it. I have seen reviews call this film ‘sanitised’ for this clean-cut, conflict-avoidant approach to tackling Michael’s life, and that is the perfect way of putting it. Not acknowledging issues and controversy, sitting in blissful ignorance, is not how you do a biopic of somebody’s life, because, as amazing as he was, he was human just like the rest of us.

Most of my other criticisms come from how rushed and glossed over almost every aspect of this film is. Right at the forefront is Jafar Jackson, who, after a tireless search for the right person to play Michael, was selected, having had no acting experience at all. Without being mean to him, you can tell that this is the case. He is often very wooden, doing the opposite of most new actors and just under-acting everything. In emotional scenes, his face remains still, offering no meaningful expression, and it takes you out of the experience. The other side of the coin is that when it comes to properly embodying his uncle’s stage presence and vocal performance, he does tremendously. Jafar’s casting was evidently a double-edged sword, killing all the performance aspects of his uncle that he had no doubt studied all his life, but neglecting to act well in the slower and more intimate moments. Essentially, his performance can be looked at as a microcosm for the film itself, prioritising those big moments and trying to mimic them as best as possible, and leaving no room for anything else outside of that. The biggest case of the film rushing is the time-jumps that seem to come every few minutes, none of which seemed to be intelligently edited to complement one another. It will cut from the Jackson 5 doing their first gigs and their father saying they were not good enough, to them topping the charts and becoming a household name in the space of five seconds. It is simply too fast and leaves no time for impactful development, which is especially frustrating when some other pointless scenes, like the repetitive scenes with Michael and either of his parents, are played out and drag the runtime. Michael‘s worst case of rushing and being overly zealous with its time jumps is when it cuts to the ending concert of the film, of Michael performing ‘Bad!’. The build-up for that album is key because it saw him gain a lot of criticism for being outdated and past his peak in the mid-80s, and that album was a response to that, hence its title. Feeding into that aforementioned ‘sanitised’ nature, none of that criticism is shown at all, and that song and album come out of nowhere. Like most of the songs, we see no background to the creative process, no thought behind the song placement. Just a performance of an obviously brilliant song, but one that does not feel built up to or earned at all.

Michael is a deeply frustrating film that shows some of the worst aspects of these music biopics that the world has obsessed over for the past few years. It has some excellent concert moments and musical performances, but beyond that, nothing enjoyable or competently made is to be found. You can feel the film crawling along, itching to get to its next song moment, because that really is all it has to offer. And even then, those songs are Michael Jackson’s, not the films. All the film can do is copy what is good in a slightly worse fashion than its original material and fail to show anything good that came from its own creative process. If you are one of the few people in the world who do not enjoy Jackson’s music, I do not even need to tell you not to bother with this. If you do, you may get a slight sense of joy here and there. But whilst doing so, you will have to ask yourself: could I get an even better experience by just watching old clips of him performing at home? For me, the answer to that question is a resounding ‘yes,’ and I believe you are lying to yourself if you answer otherwise.