Biopics that are genuinely great films

There are not many but there are sure a lot of good movies with great sequences about great men (usually) with great performances that people pretend are great overall (they're not) - Gandhi, Malcolm X ...........and things like that .....because people think they are noble and on the right side of history or some nonsense.....

The better movies are often truncated biopics - that focus on a specific narrow period - Capote is a pretty great movie imo......32 Short Films About Glenn Gould ......Serpico, Lenny, Raging Bull.......Vincent & Theo is not only the best movie about Van Gogh but of a painter also and actually any form of Art or artist regardless of their medium........

My Left Foot is a great movie......for movie nerds there is also Edvard Munch (1974) a unique kind of masterpiece

For a recent one I thought Control (2007) was a worthy film about a great artist (Ian Curtis) and it looked like its subject in how it was shot .......a better Rock and Roll movie than 99% of what you'll see.....it has a clear and specific intellectual POV - it feels like a great movie anyway......

Oh honey, if you've read a few biographies on Frida Kahlo, then you'll appreciate the labour of love that Julie Taymor's Frida (2002) is... it's pretty faithful to the retelling, inventively made with the Brothers Quay's animation and wonderfully reconstructed and fairly accurate to the Kahlo story. It has a great soundtrack as well.  In an ideal world, I probably would have had the Mexican singer Lila Downs (who at the time looked uncannily like Kahlo, than Hayek) play Kahlo but then she wouldn't have had the big name draw.  I will be forever grateful that Madonna or Jennifer Lopez never got their Kahlo projects made.




Another favourite of mine is Philip Kaufman's Henry & June (1990) which depicts writer Anais Nin's meeting Henry Miller & his wife June in an erotic triangle. What struck me about this movie is the tone is pitch perfect - even reading Nin's work you get the feeling of (slightly annoying) narcissistic pretension and I think that is wonderfully captured here - it feels like fiction, which is what Nin's diaries ultimately were.  Best of all about it, is the level of attractive richness and research and artistic history that has gone into Kaufman's Paris of the 1930s: mostly inspired by Brassai's photographs; the use of clips from iconic movies of the time: Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929); Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928); Madchen in Uniform (1931); Ekstase (1933); Soundtrack featuring Josephine Baker's songs from the late 20s & 30s, among others, the recreation of Le Monocle, the famous Parisian Lesbian nightclub; The Arts Balls; The Brothels; Nin's house, the clothes, etc. It's a jewel.  I feel it fits Nin's work really well.  I have also noticed that it is often imitated in documentaries about Anais Nin.

I find it really fascinating when written biographies are visualised.







 

Malcolm X

The Social Network

This is not only like the perfect answer - it's also a crucial answer unlike any other we'll see probably:

The central character - who is very much alive and thriving, is depicted as a villain both in the great opening scene and the great closing scene  even though in his life he wasn't someone we associate with villainy at all - merely getting obscenely wealthy - he wins and loses .........and at every point more or less in-between he's depicted in that way........that's usually a death knell for a biopic where central charcaters have to overcome and grow.

We forgive it in things like Goodfellas because it's not "really" a biopic - although you could I guess call it that - and because Henry Hill was unknown to us before seeing it........and we fudge "history"  in some biopics where it's "unclear" -  Judas and The Black Messiah is a great movie imo - but I'm not sure Fred Hampton was as gentle as that movie portrays him to be - like the flawed Malcolm X  it mixes things up - between facts, fiction, directorial slant - so as to have a POV  ........but The Social Network suggests you can actually do biopics and have that POV and influence the culture in - more or less - the current moment by which particular facts you cherry pick - not in a "dead" way

The Social Network gets credit for being "great" and it is - what it doesn't get enough is credit for being "important" - iirc the knock on that movie at the time was something like "why do I need to see a movie about Facebook?" but it actually is persuasive about more than just that ........

Amadeus
Malcolm X
Lawrence of Arabia
The Elephant Man
Schindler's List

Mr. Turner

One that has not yet been mentioned... Reds (1981). 

Among the ones not yet mentioned, I (of course) think that Lincoln achieves a certain kind of biopic genre perfection: 1) it tells a story about a very specific period of its subject's life but manages to vividly explore said subject despite those temporal constraints; 2) it doesn't present its subject in a vaccum but surrounds him with a plethora of colorful and memorable characters which allows for a more varied presentation of said subject (as his values and opinions are often challenged by those around him) and provides a broader scope for the movie itself; 3) it not only doesn't forget but makes it a point to underline how important period and setting are for biopics.

BH hasn't been mentioned yet?!?! Everyone's favorite film editing winner...

You mean Lincoln: vampire hunter?