4 Music Biopic Misfires That Missed the Beat, Ranked — From Back to Black to Nina

Well, the Michael Jackson biopic is here, and critics are not moonwalking with joy. With over 100 reviews in, Michael is sitting at a rough 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The big complaint: it plays the hits and dodges the hard stuff. And yet, even after Walk Hard roasted this formula years ago, studios keep cranking out music biopics because, frankly, they make money — and Michael is projected to do just fine at the box office.

"The knock on Michael: it feels like a greatest-hits album dressed up as a movie. "

So, while we wait to see how audiences land on Michael, let’s revisit four music biopics that did their icons dirty — from Queen to Amy Winehouse.

4. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

At the time, Bohemian Rhapsody had people scratching their heads — especially when it snuck into the Best Picture race despite critics being split on the movie’s actual quality. The film tracks Queen’s rise through their Live Aid triumph, framing Freddie Mercury’s life as a rebel-genius-becomes-rock-god arc. Rami Malek won Best Actor for his turn as Mercury, and while his performance is sharp, it often feels like a meticulous impression more than a full-on embodiment.

The problem is the packaging: it’s a glossy, sanitized version of an extraordinarily complicated person. It hits the familiar rise-and-fall beats, papers over major inaccuracies, and glides past Mercury’s sexuality with a shallow touch. Like Michael, it plays like a museum of highlights rather than a story with real blood in its veins. In hindsight, its awards-season glow has aged a lot closer to Crash than Moonlight.

3. Back to Black (2024)

Fifteen years after directing a previous music biopic about another controversial figure who died far too young, Sam Taylor-Johnson returned to the genre with Amy Winehouse’s story. Back to Black was always going to be compared to 2015’s documentary Amy, which already gave a searing, empathetic, and thorough portrait of Winehouse as an artist, a person struggling with addiction, and someone relentlessly exploited.

The new film got dinged even before release for casting Marisa Abela — and giving her a prosthetic nose — which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. On screen, it does Winehouse few favors: the movie leans on every music-biopic cliche, skims the surface of her demons, and mostly points the finger at the paparazzi while sidestepping tougher scrutiny of the people closest to her, including her father and boyfriend. Abela and Jack O’Connell are genuinely strong, but the movie’s final scene is so sensationalized it leaves a bad aftertaste. The whole thing feels vague and misjudged.

2. Stardust (2020)

Here’s a wild one: a David Bowie biopic that can’t use David Bowie’s music. Stardust couldn’t secure the rights, which means no Moonage Daydream, no Starman, no Life on Mars — the songs that literally define the guy. The film focuses on Bowie’s earlier years, including a U.S. tour behind his third album, The Man Who Sold the World — a point in his life when Space Oddity already existed — but the workaround never stops feeling like a glaring hole.

Even setting the rights issue aside, Stardust is bland and inauthentic, the exact opposite of its subject. It’s a color-by-numbers portrait of someone who was anything but.

1. Nina (2016)

Zoe Saldana ’s Nina sits at a brutal 2 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and that’s only part of the story. The casting itself sparked major backlash: Saldana, who is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, was put in a prosthetic nose and darker makeup to portray Nina Simone, a Black woman — a choice that drew heavy criticism. Saldana later publicly regretted taking the role.

The movie behind the controversy isn’t good either. The direction, editing, and writing flatten a tumultuous, pivotal stretch of Simone’s life into something oddly lifeless. You walk away feeling like the filmmakers never really understood her. If you actually want to know Nina Simone, a documentary or a solid biography will do more in two hours than this movie manages at all — you may finish Nina knowing less than when you started.

Bottom line: music biopics keep happening because they are box office-friendly, but when they default to safe, glossy mythmaking, they let their legends down. Michael looks set to cash in. Whether it does right by its subject is another question.