One of Our Great Directors Just Released Two Artist Biopics in the Same Month. They're Delightful.

"The built-in paradox of the artist biopic is that, with rare exceptions, any film that tries to represent the life and creative process of a great artist will necessarily result in a less brilliant work than its subject would themself have produced. , for one, is a fine example of the musical biopic, with a galvanic lead performance from Jamie Foxx, but can it hold up to Ray Charles' 1960 recording of " Georgia on My Mind"? Last year's A Complete Unknown featured a superb Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, but no one would call James Mangold's well-observed portrait of a folk musician on the verge of a creative breakthrough the cinematic equivalent of a Dylan ballad like " A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.""

"Every so often, a truly original filmmaker will tell the story of another artist's life and creative process in such a way as to create a freestanding masterpiece: Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, Max Ophüls' Lola Montès, Mike Leigh's and Topsy-Turvy, Jane Campion's Bright Star and An Angel at My Table (Leigh and Campion being among the rare directors to have pulled this feat off twice). But something about the biopic's necessary subservience to the historical record of its subject's life and work often consigns entries in this genre to middlebrow or even kitsch status."

"In two sprightly new films out this October, writer-director Richard Linklater has found an idiosyncratic way to escape this biopic trap. Blue Moon, about a single night late in the life of the great mid-20 th-century lyricist Lorenz Hart, and Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature Breathless, each proposes in its own way the notion of the biopic as an act of criticism. Linklater's evident admiration for the work of these artists has led him to make two films that set out to show audiences not necessarily who Hart and Godard were as human beings (we never see either at home, for example) but why we should care about the wor"

The artist biopic often produces work inferior to its subject because cinematic representation cannot replicate an artist's original brilliance. Musical biopics like Ray and recent portraits such as A Complete Unknown show strong performances but rarely equal the artists' own recordings or songs. Occasionally filmmakers create freestanding masterpieces about artists: Andrei Rublev, Lola Montès, Topsy-Turvy, Bright Star and An Angel at My Table achieve that rare feat. Biopics' fidelity to historical record frequently pushes them toward middlebrow or kitsch. Richard Linklater's Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague reframe the biopic as criticism, emphasizing why audiences should care about an artist's work rather than depicting private life.

Read at Slate Magazine