Antoine Fuqua’s Latest Biopic: A Safe Bet in Filmmaking with Minimal Risks

Biopics about famous musicians seldom achieve more than being elaborate informercials meant to sell new audiences on their subject’s back catalog, but “Michael” exists in a peculiar space within the genre. It’s not like the artist behind the highest selling album of all time needs to be sold to any audiences, new or otherwise. But Michael Jackson’s legacy was plenty tarnished in the latter days of his life, a reappraisal of his place in the pantheon that has continued unabated since his death in 2009. 

Few artists worth making movies about have led lives that can fit neatly within the confines of a feature film’s runtime, but Michael Jackson’s in particular feels too Herculean a task to undertake, given the complexities and challenges of his history. Yet “Michael” is an exuberant and entertaining film that sends the viewer home happy, salivating for another installment to stretch the foregone conclusion of its own success. 

It’s a different question altogether as to whether the viewer will feel the same after they’ve left the auditorium and started to ponder what a sequel could even look and feel like, and whether whatever form that continuation may take will sour the sweetness of this film.

“Michael” is not the first attempt to dramatize the King of Pop’s life, but it is the first with the budget and scale to meaningfully distill what made him such a big star. “The Equalizer 3” director Antoine Fuqua employs the same myth-making eye that made Denzel Washington’s Robert McCall the action thriller equivalent of a slasher villain to make Jaafar Jackson’s performance as his uncle pop off the screen with magical levels of clarity. Like Elvis, Michael Jackson is a figure who has become so engrained into the fabric of popular culture that the cartoonish impersonators and comedic impressions of him over the years have replaced real recollections of the man and his music. It’s difficult to thread the needle of a performance that legibly scans to the viewer as “Michael Jackson” without creating an uncanny valley that breaks the aesthetic distance.

Jaafar’s performance is uncanny, but not in the way that unsettles or confuses the mind. He provides a presence that feels measured and considered, attempting to replicate the man to a believable degree, while still allowing for this Michael to be a dramatic character who doesn’t necessarily have to carry all the weight of the man himself. John Logan’s script finds a satisfying throughline exploring Michael’s tortured relationship with his abusive father Joseph (played with aplomb by Colman Domingo). It hits a series of beats that highlight how special a musician and entertainer Michael was, largely hinging on exhaustive recreations of his most iconic moments. 

Fuqua has a blast with each major set piece, pausing time to remind the viewer just how impressive a performer Michael was. It’s the “Bohemian Rhapsody” playbook: hearing the hits, watching the moves, making the viewer repeatedly and temporarily forget they’re watching a movie and not a live concert. But Fuqua does a finer job with the scenes that dramatize the process, showing the ways Joseph’s abuse and perfectionism prove a gift and a curse for the way Michael approaches art. There’s a tenderness to Jaafar’s depiction of the way Michael pushes himself, how exacting he becomes in bringing his visions to life, and it becomes quietly heartbreaking knowing why he’s so hard on himself.

In the film’s final act, it’s a genuine thrill to see Jaafar’s performance chart an ascent of Michael’s confidence. It almost feels like the final third of a superhero movie, or watching Neo become The One in “The Matrix.” “Michael” plays like an origin story that conveniently ends before the real story gets a lot thornier.

While biopics tend to choose between a cradle to the grave approach or fixating on one specific moment in the subject’s life, “Michael” tries to have it both ways, tracking him from childhood all the way up to the era where he collaborated with Martin Scorsese. That the film’s targeted parameters are the result of legal entanglements that necessitated reshoots doesn’t absolve the filmmakers from the safe route they have taken. Figures like Michael Jackson maintain so much real estate in the pop cultural consciousness for the richness and texture of their totality as human beings, whether good or bad. It’s reductive to merely highlight the highs if there’s no room to explore the lows, regardless of what your personal opinion of the validity of said lows happens to be.

This is a film that makes plain the abuse Michael suffered in the home very early on, showing the violence before never depicting it on screen again. It shows Michael’s relative loneliness, his kinship with animals, and his arrested development as a man whose childhood was largely robbed from him. But it is not a film that tackles the other half of his life where these ideas would likely come to much more difficult fruition in the mind of the viewer. 

For “Michael” to function as the crowd-pleasing celebration it’s being marketed as, it requires a willful, collective amnesia as to what is to come in his life after this picture’s credits begin to roll. Antoine Fuqua has helmed an effective tentpole vehicle. “Michael” is almost certainly going to make an obscene amount of money at the box office and Lionsgate clearly plans to trot out a sequel as soon as humanly possible. But it remains to be seen whether that is an endeavor that will ask the hard questions this film artfully avoids or whether it will require even more elaborate lying by omission to send folks home happy a second time. 

“Michael” premieres in theaters on April 24.