So Danny Boyle won’t be making a Bowie biopic – that’s a relief

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/10/danny-boyle-bowie-biopic-musical

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The sum of its parts probably would have made it wonderful: a musical biopic of the life of David Bowie, directed by Danny Boyle, with a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce. That the project should have stumbled – over the quite sizable obstacle of Bowie’s refusal to grant permission to use his back catalogue is rather disappointing.

Boyle, after all, has shown an unwavering devotion to Bowie’s music: he asked the singer to perform at the Olympic opening ceremony, and Boyle’s 2013 thriller, Trance, was inspired by Bowie’s 1977 album, Low. It’s uncertain why Bowie declined – one suspects it might be because biopics about a still-breathing subject can feel unsettlingly premature –or whether Boyle took the refusal personally. (Bowie did after all grant permission for a musical version of his 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth.) But the director has said he channelled his disappointment into directing the Steve Jobs biopic, and placed the grand Bowie musical on the backburner, in the hope of revisiting it at some point in the future.

Still, I am rather relieved that for the time being Thin White Duke will not be made. I have a general unease about biopics, and musical biopics more than any other. There are exceptions – and Boyle’s Bowie might well have been one. But there so often seems something of the school play about them, something hammy and basic: a musical star recreated through a series of carefully observed tics and prosthetics, not to mention an era-abiding wardrobe and a whole heap of meticulous singing lessons.

A Guardian guide to some of the worst musical statues in existence – from a dubious rendering of AC/DC’s Bon Scott in Fremantle, Australia, to a blurry Paul McCartney in Liverpool – brings a similar feeling to me as watching a music biopic; that there is probably a better way, a better sculpture, to represent the music these artists made.

Because the curious thing is that biopics so rarely seem to bring a feel for music – where it came from, how it works, inspires, or flies. The famous charge levelled against music journalism is that writing about music is like dancing about architecture – and on occasion I am sure this is true. But it’s a charge we might also level at musical biopics; for all the impeccable performances and painstaking recreation they carry a strange flatness that says nothing of the great leap of the heart that the music itself can bring.

There are other ways to talk about music. Rock documentaries are often some of the most compelling, adventurous and witty examples of film-making – from Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, capturing the Band’s “farewell concert appearance”, to the celebration of Canadian heavy metal that was Anvil! The Story of Anvil, via Mistaken For Strangers – Tom Berninger’s portrait of The National – and Baillie Walsh’s fan-fired Springsteen & I.

Related: There’ll be no musical like a David Bowie musical | Sophia Deboick

Or there are those feature films that seek to capture not one sole individual but a scene, a movement, a time. Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (also written by Frank Cottrell Boyce), about Factory Records and the Manchester music scene, saw impersonations of Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays, and cast Steve Coogan as legendary label boss Tony Wilson; but it was a swell of a film, one that was less concerned with specifics and rigorous recreation, and instead accommodated myth and magic and urban legend.

Or think of Alan Parker’s The Commitments – a piece of cinema that is not only a staggeringly good adaptation of a book (Roddy Doyle’s 1987 novel about a group of working class Dubliners who form a soul band), but succeeds because it also gluts itself on music: it spills across the screen, giving voice and body to every music fan’s feeling about the records they love.

Or even consider Boyle’s own Trainspotting. Not a movie about music at all, but a piece of cinema whose soundtrack –featuring Underworld, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop – was intimately intertwined with the film itself in the manner of a Scorsese or Tarantino movie.

And maybe this is the worry with a Bowie biopic: that such a film would have to draw not only upon the specifics of a musician’s life, but also upon the specifics of his back catalogue. The best music films conjure myth and rumour in their narrative, and play fast and loose and sometimes irrationally with their soundtracks. They don’t always make logical sense, in the same way that music does not so much appeal to reason as play upon our pulses.