There’s a reason VH1 was able to produce so many episodes of Behind the Music back in the day. There nearly always drama to be found in the stories of successful musicians—moments of tragedy and triumph that any successful artist seems to have experienced in abundance. We love them for it, even when their stories feel more like cautionary tales, and so we make a lot of them into movies.
In biographical dramas about musicians, we often see stories of addiction and recovery, and of tortured souls whose only solace is in their art. Maybe that’s because many musicians lives and careers share similar trajectories; maybe it’s because those are stories that filmmakers know how to tell; and maybe it’s because those are the stories that we want to see. Regardless, we’ve built a mythology around the lives of musicians, to the point that we’re almost surprised when an artist’s life doesn’t conform to it in some way: A rock star who has never experienced a significant substance abuse disorder and tends to their mental health hardly feels like a rock star at all.
To some extent, the movies have taught us to think this way, and have left us with the troubling idea that true artists need to be tortured, and to live lives that are at least a bit tragic. There’s plenty of that in nearly every musical biopic, but the best of them offer a different and deeper perspective—considering the lives and careers of their subjects with a bit more humanity and thoughtfulness, and veering away from narrative tropes, even when they feel conveniently true to life.
