Why is it that nearly every fictional movie that is about music, or set in a musical milieu, has to feel as phony as a $2 resale ticket?
Biopics like “Michael,” “Back to Black” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” are their own unbelievable animals. But I’m talking about the wave of promising-sounding, mostly cringe-inducing dramas like “Mother Mary” (going into wide release this weekend) that give us fictionalized superstars who don’t come within 12 bars of passing the credibility test … not even when they’re played by actual pop superstars like the Weeknd and Charli xcx.
We come to these films looking for a good roman à clef that takes us deeper into the inner sanctum of the pop world, and instead find out just how much of a tin ear Hollywood has when it comes to getting anything right about music. Instead of the bygone heights of “Almost Famous,” we get our diet of pop cinema in plausibility-free efforts like “The Moment,” “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” “Trap,” “Highest 2 Lowest” and the only marginally better miniseries “Daisy Jones & the Six.”
Virtually anytime you see a scene in a Hollywood film that’s taking place on a concert stage or in the wings or in a recording studio, it feels so far removed from reality that the filmmakers might as well be imagining first contact with aliens. When M. Night Shyamalan released his thriller “Trap” last year (a story that spends so much time in a faux concert arena, the director crowed, “I directed an entire concert!”), every detail felt so off that viewers were left wondering aloud whether he’d ever been to a concert. And, all right, no one goes to a Shyamalan movie looking for verisimilitude. But willfully artier directors go just as wide of the mark; we’ve certainly found that out with David Lowery, director of A24’s “Mother Mary,” a ponderous psychodrama that has Anne Hathaway playing a superstar so emotionally frail, you’re waiting for the twist where the action is all taking place in a mental institution.
As different from each other as “Trap” and “Mother Mary” are, they have two things in common: one, a belief that musicians are most interesting for their potential as pawns in thrillers, and two, endless AI-looking shots of arena-goers waving their phones in the air, something that every director seems to believe happens throughout every song in every concert. (Note to Hollywood: Nowadays, fans reserve most of their smartphones’ battery life for shooting hours and hours of bad video.)
Anne Hathaway in “Mother Mary”
Frederic Batier. Courtesy of A24.
Lowery said he and his team were “literally using ‘Reputation’ as a guide,” referring to the Taylor Swift concert film from 2018, but there’s actually not much performance footage in “Mother Mary.” The first half is a talk-heavy two-woman play; the second half takes a turn into body horror and the supernatural. (Spoiler alert: Skip the rest of this paragraph if you are planning to see it.) A possession occurs during a séance flashback; the two principal characters take up knives and scissors to carve into themselves and each other (with consent); one of the women literally reaches inside the other to pull out a ghost, which has taken the form of a scarf. That, as Dana Carvey-as-Johnny Carson would say, is some wild, weird, wacky stuff.
But, funnily, the grisly, woo-woo bits are the parts of the movie that require the least suspension of disbelief. Because you’ll sooner believe in exorcisms-by-scissors than you will that Hathaway is a global sensation on the level of Lady Gaga, Swift or Beyoncé. Not that this is the fault of the actress: There’s virtually nothing about Lowery’s movie that suggests his research or interest in pop music went beyond the repeat viewings of the “Reputation” tour movie, which he apparently mined mostly for leggy costuming ideas. Even after the director went to the trouble of soliciting a score from Charli, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs, “Mother Mary” is yet another movie set in the pop realm that doesn’t really give a shit about music.
One intrinsic problem running through nearly all these films: A movie about fictional singers is naturally going to involve fictional hits. Even commissioning some of the planet’s top tunesmiths to deliver work for hire rarely results in songs we can believe would take over the world. Gaga singing “Shallow” in “A Star Is Born” is the exception to the rule, the one that makes every other moviemaking team think they, too, can strike gold, if they just set enough pro songwriters to doing the panning.
There’s something kind of hilarious about how “Mother Mary” solves this conundrum. As the titular character, Hathaway declares that she is just a few days away from doing an onstage premiere of a single that “might be the best song ever written in the history of songs.” (She says that somewhat facetiously, but it’s clear that this is meant to be the song that will reset everything in her career, if not her life.) It’s called “Spooky Action,” we’re told — with lyrics inspired by Einstein! — and boy, with a setup like that, we can’t wait to hear it. Yet we never do. Mother Mary is about to play the recording for Sam Anselm (played by Michaela Coel), her estranged BFF and the fashion designer whom she’s asked to create a dress for the big night. But Sam insists she doesn’t want to hear this future classic; she only wants to see Mary enact the dance she plans to do while singing it.
Those few minutes of silent solo choreography make for the movie’s best scene, but of course it’s unbelievable that this is a dance anyone could do while belting out a comeback number. It’s practically as violent as the scene in the “Suspiria” remake where a possessed dancer is made to break all the bones in her body. Still, at least we’ll get to see how this plays out onstage in the big moment, right? Nope. Mother Mary is just about to bless her audience with this possibly world-transforming tune when Lowery cuts to the credits.
It’s a cheat, but an understandable one when you hear the wan tunes that Charli and Antonoff came up with for the soundtrack. None of these pop masters was saving their A-grade material for this project. Variety critic Owen Gleiberman summed it up well in his review when he said, “To my ears, the music conjured Taylor Swift trying to be Enya.” And that’s about right: The songs had to be ethereal bangers, because actually summoning the sense of fun that pop fans crave would spoil the doomy mood.
But if not actually Enya Swift, who is Mother Mary trying to be? The most obvious thought is that, with her religious iconography, she’s a gloss on Gaga, although you’d never imagine Gaga maintaining halo headpieces as her costuming shtick through years of career reinvention. Ultimately, the character is a little-bit-of-everything amalgam, which is no way to build a convincing pop star.
If you were going to construct a musical superstar from scratch, how would you go about it? That is the $64,000 question, times a billion, and woe to the filmmakers who think they can conjure a believably iconographic presence from the ground up, though you can understand the lure of trying. You can be sure, though, that there’d be an element of cockiness that isn’t much there in Hathaway’s performance. The irony of “Mother Mary” is that, between the two leads, Coel feels like the real rock star. Put her regal face on a fake tour poster, and you might be on your way to creating an imaginary music idol we’d all want to watch come to life.
The details ring falser from there. Why does Mother Mary only need one dress for a concert in about 72 hours that should involve a multitude of costume changes? Oh, it’s because she is only doing one song at this Palladium concert, at the stroke of midnight, following an opening act that is apparently doing a full set … which is apparently the kind of thing that happens. As ludicrous concert setups go, it may be matched only by the one in Shyamalan’s “Trap,” where his leading diva, Lady Raven — portrayed by the director’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan — is doing a matinee show at an arena with multiple intermissions … because this is also a thing that happens.
One odd thing a lot of these recent films have in common is that they’re described as “psychological thrillers” even more than they are as musicals. (They’re also all pretty uniformly thrill-less, although at least “Trap” had the gumption to go out as pure, shameless pulp.) You could say that the original version of this idea was 1970’s “Performance,” in which co-directors Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell rightly or wrongly thought it would be more interesting to have Mick Jagger play a star locked in tight quarters with one other guy than have him actually out and about in the rock world.
The Weeknd in “Hurry Up Tomorrow.”
©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Co
Fifty-five years later, we have this fresh rush of music movies that are essentially pretentious two-hander dramas. The Weeknd and his “Hurry Up Tomorrow” collaborator, Trey Edward Shults, talked about how many times they watched Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” before making their movie, a psychodrama that is just extravagant enough to bear three characters. (Lowery has a visual homage to “Persona” tucked into “Mother Mary” as well.)
These two- and three-character pop dramas are strangely insular and denuded of the wider cast of characters that would accompany any halfway-real portrayal of the music biz. In all of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” even as he does stadium shows, the Weeknd appears to have only one person working for him, his manager, played by Barry Keoghan — a character so annoying, you can see why the superstar wouldn’t want to risk hiring a second employee. (In that way, it’s kind of akin to the horror/satire “The Substance,” in which Demi Moore only ever really interacts with one other person, because who needs friends, family, managers, agents or producers when you’ve got Dennis Quaid as a one-man contacts list?) There’s a heightened pretentiousness to setting a movie in the pop world and then insisting: You don’t want to see how the sausage is made, or even much performance footage; what you really want to see a music superstar do is shut up and brood.
There’s an argument to be made that filmmakers and stars are tending toward these weirdly near-Gothic dramas about pop artists in isolated settings because they believe people would be bored by any realistic portrayal of the music business or the creative process. Streaming services are already overrun by music documentaries that get into that kind of stuff, albeit whitewashed versions of it, since they’re mostly executive-produced by the stars themselves, or their labels or teams. Do we really need to see a fictionalized version of the inside-baseball stuff we’re already being served so relentlessly in doc form? You could also argue that the films that have come closest to giving us a real-feeling version of the music biz have been the satires, starting with “This Is Spinal Tap.” That genre couldn’t be more tapped out; no one needs to see any fresh mockumentary for the rest of their lives, least of all another mock-rock doc.
When it comes to dramas that portray the music world as it really is, the field of worthwhile ones has been slim. Paul Simon’s 1980 starring vehicle “One-Trick Pony” stands as a cautionary tale for that type of movie, as one of the few misfires in a brilliant career. It came closer to insider authenticity than most, but all anyone really remembers about it is a memorable final scene of Simon tossing the master tapes of his sellout project down the street … and, for insiders, the fun conceit of Rip Torn playing a guy we were meant to believe was a spoof of CBS Records chieftain Walter Yetnikoff. But no one seems able anymore to populate a script with supporting players who seem like they might really exist in the industry. In “The Moment,” Rosanna Arquette plays a brusque record company head who couldn’t care less about art, and it seems like the only reason a woman was cast for the role is that her dialogue would feel even more groaningly predictable if the character were a sexist dude. (Alexander Skarsgård’s portrayal of the flagrantly chauvinist creative director of Charli xcx’s tour is even more ham-handed.)
Music industry executives don’t necessarily come off as any more credible in the extremely rare instances in which they’re portrayed as good guys … the ultimate suspension of disbelief, for some people. Take Spike Lee’s oddball miss from last year, “Highest 2 Lowest,” which had Denzel Washington playing a mogul who seems at any given moment to have been modeled after either Berry Gordy Jr. or a non-performing Jay-Z, and ultimately just feeling like what he is — a decades-long kingpin who couldn’t exist in real life. The movie does come to life, briefly, when A$AP Rocky pops up in a recording studio sequence to start battle-rapping with Washington before he just tries to shoot him.
Charli xcx in “The Moment”
A24
But here’s something I do like about some of these recent movies: the increasing willingness to portray pop idols as jerks. (The Joan Baez character says “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob” to Dylan in a refreshing moment in “A Complete Unknown,” and that presumably made-up biopic line definitely applies to some of these faux rock stars as well.) In “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” for instance, it’s sort of shocking how cavalierly the Weeknd brushes off Jenna Ortega after their seemingly meaningful one-night stand … in a way that lends the drama some bracing believability, before it takes another turn toward outlandishness and even bloody Grand Guignol. Nick Jonas plays a pop star whose lovability may be a mask for being a louse in the upcoming “Power Ballad“; part of the fun there is trying to get ahead of whether a character played by a Jonas bro will have to turn out to have a heart of gold or not. The best instance of playing with this malleability might have been the under-seen St. Vincent vehicle “The Nowhere Inn,” in which, playing a fictional version of herself, the star starts out sweet and then becomes a monster, in a satirical arc so straight-faced some viewers didn’t get it.
None of these films completely works, but the fact that a few music stars are willing to play themselves (or fictional variations thereof) as egotists or blockheads is kind of an encouraging development. Charli xcx, in particular, showed some courage in that regard with her starring vehicle “The Moment,” in which the more she pouted, the greater her screen charisma seemed to be. (Whether she would have nearly as much magnetism if she were trying to be America’s sweetheart remains to be seen, but maybe she’ll continue to make brave choices of roles and we won’t have to find out.) The movie is a mess, and I only made it through some of it by trying to guess whether the tour rehearsal sequences were meant to be deliberately satirizing the performance look and style of perceived bete noire Taylor Swift, or if any resemblance is strictly coincidental. But the best and most surprising part about the film is the ending (spoiler alert), which we expect to be a triumphant moment in which Charli will rebel against the forces manipulating her to sell out and heroically reclaim her integrity; instead, the character just sort of wearily gives in. That’s a level of cynicism we can all believe in.
But here’s one reason why I believe audiences might still cotton to an entire movie that conveys a sense of authenticity about the music biz: the success of the Tony-winning play “Stereophonic.” Crowds on Broadway have shown an enthusiasm for watching what could be seen as the tedium of the recording studio play out over three hours, complete with band arguments, angry drum-offs and long silences between playbacks. That the play is veritably ripped from the pages of Fleetwood Mac lore doesn’t hurt, but it provides a promise that film audiences might also sit still for a movie that portrays the creation of music authentically, and not just as a backdrop for psychosexual high jinks.
Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas in “Power Ballad”
David Cleary/Lionsgate
There are two recent or upcoming projects that I think come closest to getting the music milieu right in a fictional film. One is the aforementioned “Power Ballad,” a musical comedy-drama coming out June 5 (following its domestic premiere in March at SXSW). It’s a bona fide crowd-pleaser, and even though it has its own logic lapses and credulity-straining moments, it doesn’t insult your intelligence as a music fan or even a biz insider. Most music dramas focus either on someone at the very top of the ladder or someone at rock bottom, and “Power Ballad” benefits from having both — Paul Rudd as somebody who coulda been a contender but is reduced to fronting a wedding band and Jonas as a boy-band refugee reestablishing himself as a solo superstar. The changing dynamic between these two guys as they become friends and then adversaries is so intriguing that you don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether it’s realistic that the syrupy ballad they’re fighting over would become a global No. 1 hit. It wouldn’t, but at least, unlike with “Mother Mary,” they tried to imagine what a smash sounds like.
The other film that lives up to its promise is last year’s “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” which stars Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden as folk-rock duo McGwyer Mortimer, long-estranged lovers as well as former partners in music who are offered a tidy sum by a multimillionaire to come reunite for him, and him alone, on his remote island. Although it’s a comedy, it feels wistfully real when the two singing leads have to navigate old attractions and resentments, like a lower-rent Buckingham and Nicks. It fits into the music-movie subgenre that inevitably holds the most resonance: films about musicians whose dreams didn’t come true, and whose songs are strong but not quite so amazing that we have to imagine they changed the world.
Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden in “The Ballad of Wallis Island’
Alistair Heap
Between “Power Ballad” and “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” you have a pair of movies that address subjects musicians will be relating to for a long time to come: battles over songwriting credits … and aging performers finding that their only viable financial future may lie with well-heeled patrons, doing house concerts.
In the meantime, we can all dream of a music movie that succeeds in even grander ambitions, like capturing the lightning in a bottle that happens when the spark of musical genius makes it through a hundred gauntlets to galvanize the public. If it ever happens, that will be more thrilling than a thousand pseudo-musical psychological thrillers.
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