Pop music is at once ubiquitous and unknowable. Almost everyone knows what it sounds like, at least for some period of their lives, and the really successful stuff, like certain one-hit novelties or any number of canonical Michael Jackson songs, lives on far beyond its initial era. Yet that kind of vast and echoing success is by its nature mysterious and rarified; there’s a reason its conduits are often compared to magic. Magicians are tricky to depict in cinema because the live mix of credulousness and disbelief is so easy to get wrong or slickly fake with visual effects. Pop music, whether shown through real artists or fictional ones, is similarly fraught. Specifically, it often feels phony as hell.
Yes, there are the more obvious stumbling blocks like a star imperfectly impersonating another star, or, in the cases of fictionalized pop, the creation of idols that are hard to picture making it in the real world. But there are also visual and thematic cues that strike such consistently false notes that sometimes it feels like the knowing unreality of something like Josie And The Pussycats, where comic book characters experience overnight success based on record-company machinations and subliminal messaging, is the only viable option. We’re forced to confront the phoniness of pop on film again with the release of Antoine Fuqua’s Michael, a new and much-discussed biopic (in part, anyway) of Michael Jackson, one of the biggest pop stars the world has ever seen.
For the moment, let’s set aside the sins of omission in Michael‘s time frame. What’s truly striking about Michael is how flimsy the movie is on its own terms of spectacle-driven idolatry. Some of the movie’s phoniness has to do with run-of-the-mill terrible storytelling, or lack thereof. There’s a pervasive vagueness about what, precisely, Jackson’s sensibility or point of view as a solo artist is, even as those around him insist that he has “something to say.” The screenplay by the once-dependable John Logan features a truly astounding number of similarly perfunctory lines and exchanges; not a single conversation in Michael sounds like two humans talking to each other; instead, they tend to softly exchange bits of background information in oddly narcotized tones.
These are all damaging. Where the movie actually falls down, though, is what will inevitably be characterized as its saving grace: the scenes featuring Jackson’s music, particularly several where songs are performed nearly in full. Or lip-synced, anyway; Jackson’s real-life nephew Jafaar may have the moves down as Uncle Michael, but he hasn’t been entrusted to sing the songs himself, so we get a peculiar (if relatively common) tribute-act effect where the audience is expected to believe they’re watching some uncanny channeling rather than an embodiment less risky than karaoke.
That’s only the beginning of the disconnect on display in the film’s performance scenes. Fuqua began his film career as a slick stylist with a background in 1990s music videos; early Fuqua movies like The Replacement Killers and Bait may be junk, but they’re sleek-looking junk that resemble music videos far more than anything depicted in Michael. There’s one potentially interesting scene in the movie where Jackson shoots the “Beat It” music video with real gang members, teaching them the choreography as he goes; Fuqua shoots it with a straightforward roteness that drains the song of its electricity.
That’s true of the live concert scenes, too; the camera doesn’t ever appear anywhere that would be out of place in a genuine television broadcast, yet because Fuqua isn’t really shooting a genuine live performance, there’s a neither-here-nor-there quality. He never ascends into Baz Luhrmann-style delirium, but he doesn’t capture anything resembling the fullness of a roof-rocking arena show, either. The crowd shots look canned and over-posed, and while Jafaar Jackson himself is an impressive dancer, he never seems particularly in sync with what the camera is doing. There are only glimmers of the pop ecstasy Jackson was supposed to inspire on his best days.
As a result, almost every scene in the movie feels ineffably off, even when Fuqua is trying to do something as simple as let the audience get lost in some of the most beloved pop songs ever made. Those music scenes may not even read as unrealistic, per se. Though they’re doing a poor imitation of live television performance and/or music video, those forms are how the world came to know Jackson as a solo artist. Not everyone minds when biopics depart from reality—some audiences seem to actively prefer it, and it’s really no different from a tolerance of clichés from other genres. These movies have their own conventions, and though there are a few moments where, say, Bohemian Rhapsody makes a decent attempt to explain the unlikely artistic chemistry between Freddie Mercury and the rest of Queen, it’s difficult to capture the art of creation. The refraction of that creativity tends to play better; some of the best pop-music movies are actually about fandom, whether that manifests as Almost Famous-style mooniness or High Fidelity-style gatekeeping. These movies talk pop music in ways that should be embarrassing, but actually feel more lyrical than what most musical biopics can manage.
Mother Mary, David Lowery’s film that’s expanding into wider release as Michael invades multiplexes, is not a musical biopic, nor is it quite at the level of a great movie about pop music. Superficially, it’s a great example of the other side of cinematic pop failure, where making up a fictional music star who supposedly holds audiences in her thrall can be a tricky pastiche game. Lowery has said that Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway), the pop singer at the center of his film, was partially inspired by Taylor Swift and her Reputation concert film, though Swift’s propensity for genre-hopping doesn’t seem likely to jump into Lady Gaga-level costuming and quasi-religious imagery any time soon.
For that matter, Mother Mary herself, despite an abiding love of headdresses, comes across as more serious-minded and thematically sober than either Gaga or Charli xcx, the latter of whom co-wrote some of Mary’s songs. She’s not even much like the real Mother Mary, an art-pop group that uses similar imagery and has joked about the movie’s similarities to them on Instagram (though, again, it’s hard to imagine Lowery actually took much from them besides some Madonna-style religious imagery). At times, her half-mournful, half-hypnotic electronic anthems sound a bit like British pop act Self Esteem—though it’s really the cadence of narration from Sam (Michaela Coel), Mary’s former designer and confidante, that sounds like it could serve as a temp track for a sequel to Self Esteem’s “I Do This All The Time.” Both leads have a morose grandiosity underlining how difficult it can be to imagine a new pop star from scratch—and how imagining one based on existing trends may be even harder.
Mother Mary, then, does not particularly traffic in realistic human interaction any more than Michael does. It starts out like a stage play, with Mary turning up unannounced to Sam’s estate after years apart, begging her to design a last-minute dress for her upcoming comeback concert. The movie itself also has passages the resemble a concert—it has nearly as much performance footage as Michael, for a fabricated pop star who’s never quite convincing as a global sensation—and then becomes a sort of spooky music video as Mary and Sam re-bond (sort of) over a mutual haunting (sort of) and attempt a form of exorcism. I’ve seen the movie twice and I don’t feel entirely comfortable explaining what happens in it, even though everything depicted on screen is relatively straightforward.
Lowery’s interpretation of pop music skews far less playful than current trends—or, really, almost any mega-popular singer that springs to mind. Has there ever been a huge pop star who seems as uninterested in a good time as Mother Mary? (Maybe Adele, with her torchy songs? But her between-song banter is downright cheeky.) In that sense, Mother Mary is as phony as any other pop-music movie. It brings to mind Vox Lux, a terrifically compelling and provocative movie where Natalie Portman, another performer in the Hathaway mold, is both excellent in her scenes and not entirely convincing as a world-famous pop diva. Visually, however, Lowery creates a more convincing alternate world of cavernous interiors that feels more true to both the reach and the isolation of his subject. In one of the film’s most striking shots, a series of Mother Mary shows are depicted through a superficially stagey but actually cinematic conceit: The camera tracks her from the side as she ascends a series of staircases onto a series of performance stages, then immediately exits down another staircase, eliding the travel, preparation, and actual performances, while still illustrating the dreamlike grind of appearing in front of so many massive crowds.
When Lowery does show more traditional concert footage, he focuses much more on the icy-blue space than on shots of the fans. This may be partially a budgetary issue (likely it’s easier to simulate the feeling of a big crowd than to hire an appropriately massive number of extras), but the emphasis on Mother Mary’s stage environment, and how the fans’ outstretched arms complement it, is also far more evocative of that strange, abstract space a pop star occupies from their point of view, symbolically close to many while isolated from so much. It’s a simultaneous presence and absence: Their music is everywhere with a wafting universality that their physical body cannot match. Sets and costumes are imperfect means of bridging those gaps.
This reflects the nominal story of Mother Mary, where a pop star is distraught without her once-closest friend—not because she’s become alienated by her own fame (at least not entirely) but because her friend’s clothing designs are a part of her self-expression and image-making. It’s a far more powerful idea about artistic control (and collaboration) than Michael‘s anodyne gestures toward the same, where Jackson blithely mentions that for Thriller, he wants to be in charge of everything: “The tracklist, the visuals…” He trails off on that lazily 2020s colloquialism—what did “the visuals” even refer to in 1982?—because the movie wants to create an auteurist illusion without committing to its version of Jackson ever expressing any particular ideas.
The same could be said for the sensibility of Mother Mary, who doesn’t communicate much to Sam about what this dress needs to do, beyond feel more like her than what had been previously offered. Eventually, their plans pivot more toward a kind of spiritual seamstress work, and the movie gets a little woo-woo in the details. (Lowery loves a ghost story.) But the movie is thinking about the parts of themselves that a star might let go of in order to create more popular art, or perhaps the version of themselves they have to create alongside the music itself.
Any attendant vagueness in those ideas turns out to be preferable to the many pop biopics that seem addicted to literalism even when they’re actively obscuring truths. This isn’t the case for all of them; I’m Not There remains a gold standard in presenting ways of looking at a pop artist rather than a monument to their greatness—and acknowledging that those ways of looking will involve some form of artifice. There may not have been any saving Michael, given that it’s an estate-approved project starring a member of Jackson’s actual family. But perhaps the most galling thing about it in its current form is how little it engages with that idea of artifice, despite highlighting Jackson’s yearning for his own Neverland to create a better version of his own difficult childhood. Mother Mary isn’t the ultimate pop-star movie, and there are plenty of ways to nitpick its interpretation of a world so many have glimpsed and so few have experienced firsthand. But at least Lowery offers a fakeness we can believe in.
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