Music biopics struggle with inherent flaw

Acting, playing instruments two different skills

If you truly love Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a Jenga tower of a biopic – doomed from the start, anxious fun after that, with everything toppling to bits in the final scene.

Some who dislike this movie have been reasonably repulsed by the prosthetic teeth that Oscar-nominated Rami Malek dons in hopes of transforming himself into the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury – but the grand finale of “Bohemian Rhapsody” confirms that Malek has a much more significant problem with his donk. When Malek struts through a restaging of Queen’s triumphal 1985 Live Aid performance at Wembley Stadium, he tries to nail it step for step, but as rock ‘n’ roll connoisseurs, we know something weird is happening.

That’s because we all arrived at the multiplex fluent in the motion of Mercury’s ocean, the dip in his hip, the flutter in his butter – and we can see that what Malek is doing on screen isn’t exactly that. Same goes for the rockdude postures of Gwilym Lee playing Queen guitarist Brian May, Joe Mazzello as bassist John Deacon and Ben Hardy as drummer Roger Taylor. For the movie’s big finish, all four actors are pantomiming rock ‘n’ roll when they should be tricking us into believing that they’re actually making some.

Most musical biopics threaten to derail themselves for a more obvious reason: even the greatest, coolest, most beautiful actors will never be as great, cool or beautiful as the demigods they’re aiming to portray. But as dedicated moviegoers, we’ve been trained to quietly munch our Junior Mints, suspend our disbelief and let the miracle of cinema come pouring into our sensorium. When an actor tries to ace a beloved musician’s voice, affectation or general aura, we’re eager to buy in.

But what about acting out the music itself? That’s so much harder to pull off. Take all the piano lessons you want, but if you haven’t made big noises for big audiences for hundreds of nights of your life, it’ll show. Moving your body to a sound is so much different than using your body to generate one.

And that’s why the Jenga blocks start to wobble in the middle of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” when Queen begins to tour the American highways in a montage sequence of re-created concerts. Yes, Malek has all of Mercury’s clothes, a few of Mercury’s dance steps and 130 percent of Mercury’s overbite. What he doesn’t have is Mercury’s limbs, Mercury’s ligaments, Mercury’s muscle memory or Mercury’s neurons telling Mercury’s brain what Mercury’s ears are hearing and how it might inform where Mercury’s tush should go next.

I’d argue that this unsolvable little problem proves fatal in every musical biopic ever made – the good ones, the lousy ones, even the ones I haven’t seen. In “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” Angela Bassett stops being Tina Turner the moment her character steps on a stage. Never mind his valiant singing – as soon as Joaquin Phoenix strums a guitar in “Walk the Line,” he’s no longer Johnny Cash. Sam Riley can only try to replicate the electro-shocked stage presence of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in “Control.” And while the cast of “Straight Outta Compton” barely passed for the wildly charismatic N.W.A., the movie’s pivotal concert scene lands somewhere between a weird Halloween party and a parody sketch with no jokes.

So how about casting actual musicians for these roles? Surely, a real pop star has the body-knowledge required to get the job done. Nice idea, but so far, the results have been mixed. In 2013, “Jimi: All Is By My Side” found Andre 3000, (probably the greatest rapper of his time), playing Jimi Hendrix, (probably the greatest guitarist of his time) – but asking one iconic stage performer to transform into another iconic stage performer requires the audience to forget too much of what they know about both.

As for the miracles that Jamie Foxx worked in “Ray,” let’s not forget that he also had the advantage of playing a singer who didn’t ascend to superstardom on camera. What if we had first met a young Ray Charles on MTV? Would we feel the same about Foxx’s Oscar-winning performance? Instead of mystically gobsmacked, we might only be profoundly amazed.

Malek isn’t all that impressive in his execution of Mercury, but he is insanely brave for accepting the job – something he appears to have done in good faith. Good for him, good for us. How would humanity progress without these gusto-havers signing up for the impossible? That said, if Malek actually wins the Oscar for actor in a leading role at Sunday night’s Academy Awards, it’ll be a bummer, just as “Bohemian Rhapsody” winning best picture would be a farce.