Biography of movies

Director Spike Lee takes the approach of sharing a large percentage of the life of one of America’s most well-known and impactful civil rights leaders: Malcolm X. It’s an approach that has failed more often than not, but over three hours, Lee and star Denzel Washington are able to give Malcolm’s life the richness and attention to detail it deserves in this film. The result is a fully three-dimensional portrait that follows the man from childhood to his assassination and many places in between.

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The layers in the feature film debut of director Lin-Manuel Miranda are truly one of a kind. The movie introduces us to Jonathan Larson (played by Andrew Garfield), who became best known for writing the broadway musical Rent. But in Tick, Tick…Boom!, he’s both struggling to break into the musical industry and, in a parallel but future-looking story, acting in the musical he wrote before Rent. That musical? Tick, Tick…Boom! about a writer struggling to break into the musical industry. It all makes sense—somehow—on the screen, and it’s both wildly entertaining and tinged with tragedy for people who know Larson’s fate. (He’d never get to see Rent premiere.)

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The bio-pic is a genre of extremes. The best ones share a uniquely powerful artistic authority, but merely ordinary ones are truly disheartening. The trouble isn’t only that of inflated prestige; bio-pics are disproportionately prominent during awards season and therefore ballyhooed nearly to oblivion. The form’s peculiar place in the art of movies is inseparable from the reasons for its exceptional prominence in the business. For producers and studios considering which projects to green-light, bio-pics check a lot of boxes. The protagonists are people who audiences are already familiar with and interested in. (J. Robert Oppenheimer may be the exception that proves the rule; he’s less famous than Freddie Mercury, but the atomic bomb is more so.) And the illustrious people who inspire bio-pics offer great showcases for actors. That attracts stars, which in turn attracts audiences. Bio-pics bathe the producers, the studios, and the filmmakers in the reflected renown of their protagonists’ achievements, and, because the enterprise inherently involves a good deal of research, it also conveys an air of studious seriousness. Presenting real-life stories as extraordinary adventures, bio-pics embody the axiom that truth is stranger than fiction. (Fear not: by the time Hollywood gets d

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