Fred Astaire Is Getting a Biopic: There is something very fascinating about how the world of cinema keeps discovering people and decides to tell their story to the world in the form of a movie.
Fred Astaire Is Getting a Biopic
Fred Astaire is having a moment of cultural resurrection of his own with a biopic. Tom Holland is reportedly playing the legendary dancer in an upcoming Sony biopic directed by Paul King, with Sabrina Carpenter as Ginger Rogers and Margaret Qualley as Astaire’s sister Adele Astaire.
With the talks surrounding the biopic itself, the artist has become a talking point again, which made us think about the artists who already have perfectly good biopics somewhere in the cinematic universe, out there for us all to watch.
Let us be honest, we have this peculiar habit with biopics: a film becomes a cultural event; everyone knows it, has seen clips, has opinions about the performance, or it simply gets lost in the cinema’s Bermuda Triangle, and some of these films rather require a little rescue operation, not necessarily because they are flawless or are some sort of historical gospel. No, neither. But because these films are interesting in their own little ways.
So before Fred Astaire gets his new Hollywood chapter, here are five biopics that have been quietly waiting for a little rediscovery.
Basquiat: Jean-Michel Basquiat
Released in 1996, Basquiat stars Jeffrey Wright as Jean-Michel Basquiat, with David Bowie playing Andy Warhol. Schnabel, himself a painter, made the film his feature directorial debut, which matters because Basquiat does not feel like a Wikipedia page given some frames per second.
The movie feels less like a conventional biopic and more like an immersion into the art world of the 1980s. It is a little messy and sensory, which feels appropriate for an artist whose life and work were constantly being pulled between creation, fame, money, racism, addiction and the hungry machinery of the art world.
Born to Be Blue: Chet Baker
Chet Baker, the beautiful trumpet player, had his rise, addiction, physical damage and the attempts to rebuild himself, but Born to Be Blue does not try to squeeze his entire existence into two hours.
Ethan Hawke plays Chet Baker in this 2015 film, which focuses largely on the time when Baker was trying to rebuild his career, and this is precisely why it works as a film rather than becoming a Chet Baker discovery page with music. The movie is interested in the uncomfortable middle; the centre where the artist is trying to figure out whether there is still an artist left inside him.
Love & Mercy: Brian Wilson
Love & Mercy is about Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ singer and songwriter, but refuses to tell his story straightforwardly.
The film moves between two periods of Wilson’s life: his extraordinary creative period and his later life in the 1980s. Paul Dano plays the younger Wilson while John Cusack plays the later version, and there is something poetic about the way it has been made. The film is more like entering somebody’s memory and finding that things have been rearranged.
Pollock: Jackson Pollock
Before the internet made every artist’s personal life a part of the discourse, there was Jackson Pollock, who became one of America’s defining art figures.
Pollock was released in 2000, starring Ed Harris as the painter and was also Harris’ directorial debut. The film centres not only on Pollock’s rise but also on his relationship with Lee Krasner, his alcoholism and the destructive relationship between artistic fame and personal life.
Miles Ahead: Miles Davis
Don Cheadle plays Miles Davis in the 2015 film Miles Ahead, which he has also co-written and directed. Instead of giving us the standard biopic template, the film focuses on a particular period of Davis’ life and deliberately takes a more unconventional approach.
Instead of fitting everything into the biopic, the film uses a compressed, fragmented structure inspired by the way Cheadle experienced Davis’ music. It takes a completely different route in storytelling and action-oriented detours, but perhaps that is what makes Miles Ahead interesting to revisit.
Perhaps the Problem Is That We Expect Biopics to Be Events
This is perhaps the central reason as to why these films feel lesser-known. We have become accustomed to such films arriving with an entire ecosystem around them, and suddenly the movie itself might even become secondary, but the artist itself is a messy subject and never linear in appearance. You cannot really fit a creative life into a three-act structure for the reel
The story is never just about being famous; never simply about rise-and-fall, and perhaps that is what makes these films worth rediscovering now. An artist’s life does not necessarily need another monumental moment; sometimes it just needs a movie willing to sit in the mess.
So, let Hollywood remind us why Fred Astaire still looks like somebody discovered a secret loophole in gravity, but while everyone is looking forward to the next big artist biopic, perhaps this is the sign to dig up the old, forgotten ones again.
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