What music films so often get wrong — and how they can sing a different tune
Last weekend, Ragtag Cinema held a brief run of “Indigo Girls: It’s Only Life After All,” and already the documentary is available to stream at home. So goes the self-defeating world of theatrical windows these days.
“Back to Black,” about the short, tumultuous life of Amy Winehouse, gets a wide release this Friday. Both projects shine light on the vexing process of depicting musical genius on the big screen.
We know these singers, songwriters and instrumentalists are great. But capturing their greatness cinematically seems elusive and is rarely — if ever — cracked.
The apparent arc of “Back to Black” can best be described using the Denis Leary model for biopics. “I’m poor and I’m high. I ‘m rich and I’m high. I got too high and now I’m ... dead.” Perhaps the Winehouse story asks for such a deductive portrayal, given the melancholic nature of her songs; the film relives the words of a sad woman unlucky in love and hooked on every substance she could find.
The fact she lived so, with such a way with words and a wonderful voice, is hard to depict. Not to mention the fact that her life followed such a pattern. She spiraled with addiction and bad relationships with men. The stereotypes are what they are because they fit reality so well; there’s a reason the Leary bit is so memorably funny. When someone finds fame too fast, the downfall is not too far behind.
It's no doubt challenging to reconcile what made Winehouse so unique while depicting the reality of her soapy yet dark dysfunction. Actress Marisa Abela has the look and the sound. But where did this music come from? How did these words mold together so melodically? Often, biopics do not even attempt this. Some wannabe manager or producer throws off a line like “What you have is special!” or “You’ve broken the mold with this new tune!” Not insightful. "Back to Black" will rise or fall with its effort.
With the 2015 documentary “Amy,” we see Winehouse talking about her influences and what inspired her. Then again, that documentary focused quite a bit on the boozing and the pills and the rough relationship with ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil. A tragedy is too compelling not to tell, it seems, and even a documentary has trouble understanding the alchemy of genius.
Documentaries about musicians can also veer into idolization. With “It’s Only Life After All,” documentarian Alexandria Bombach gets lots of access to the duo from Decatur, Georgia, as well as all the home-video footage Amy Ray took of the revolutionary musicians as they moved up the ranks.
There’s lots of concert footage and moments of guitar strumming, but no sense how the Indigo Girls came up with their unique sound, where they developed their lyrics or even the process for how they make their music. While there’s lots of material to enjoy if you’re a fan, it’s an incurious film.
In fact, the audience doesn’t even get a sense of how the duo burst onto the scene. There’s a quick clip of Michael Stipe announcing how they would be in some festival he was curating. Otherwise, the documentary suggests the Indigo Girls sort of materialized in the late 1980s and early '90s when resistance to gay and lesbian culture was becoming less rigid. That somehow these queer Southern musicians became chic as AIDS became more understood and Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet.
Yet while the film makes this societal connection, the subjects themselves dismiss it. Arguing that their lesbianism was something they could not fully embrace as they became more famous. Their resistance to being tied to larger cultural forces is something the documentary itself discards.
With all this access and material, the takeaway from “It’s Only Life After All” is a statement of their activism for a variety of issues, particularly environmental justice. Sometimes this appears as a stereotype itself, like caricatures of white fortune posing as liberal guilt. Hopefully their money and fame help shine a light on the causes they care about. Which is good of them to do! But what of the music?
In the end, the film seems more like the work of an adoring fan than someone trying to figure out what makes a musician tick.
Perhaps such stories lack visual flair or lack the drama of a musician’s personal life. But understanding why someone is not only talented, but connects with a larger audience, should be a bigger piece of these narratives. It’s been done before. The Brian Wilson biopic “Love and Mercy” comes close, as does the epic telling of N.W.A in “Straight Outta Compton.” Those films are about 10 years old now.
Our artists, as they get older and as the memories of them fade in our collective conscience, deserve more films that dig into their talent and help us understand why they matter.
James Owen is the Tribune’s film columnist. In real life, he is a lawyer and executive director of energy policy group Renew Missouri. A graduate of Drury University and the University of Kansas, he created Filmsnobs.com, where he co-hosts a podcast. He enjoyed an extended stint as an on-air film critic for KY3, the NBC affiliate in Springfield, and now regularly guests on Columbia radio station KFRU.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: What music films so often get wrong — and how they can sing a different tune
