Transcript of Sunday Special: Springsteen, Dylan and the Art of the Biopic

Hi, my name is Sondra E. Garcia, and I'm a reporter at the New York Times. I write for the Style Desk, where we try to understand our complicated world by keeping up with culture. We want to take you to the forefront of cultural shifts and let you know why things are trending. Our subscribers make this coverage possible so the New York Times can continue to highlight the stories that go beyond breaking news. Help us keep a pulse on culture by subscribing at nytimes. Com/subscribe. This is the Sunday special. I'm Gilbert Cruz. It's possible you've seen somewhere on the internet or somewhere in your social media feeds, images of the actor, Jeremy Allen-White, looking a lot like Bruce Springsteen. That's because this Friday, the film Springsteen Deliver Me From Nowhere is coming out. It's a movie about a brief and dark and very specific period of Springsteen's life. That's what we're going to talk about today, not just that upcoming movie, but we're going to be talking generally about the music biopic. It's a genre that Hollywood loves to dip into, and it's a genre that the academy really loves to reward with lots and lots of Oscar nominations.

Today, I'm here with two of my colleagues, Lindsay Zolads, a pop music critic here at the Times and author of our Amplifier newsletter. Welcome, Lindsay. Hi. And Joe Cascarelli, a culture reporter and one of the co-hosts of Popcast. Thanks for being here, Joe.

Hey, Gilbert.

Let's start off by talking about the Springsteen movie. Deliver Me From Nowhere is about the making of his album, Nebraska. It's the early '80s. He's just come off several hit records, a hit tour. And as we all know now, he was driven to record and release this very stripped-down, extremely extremely lofi album without the East Street Band. I saw this movie a couple of months ago at the Telleride Film Festival. Joe, you recently saw this movie. What expectations did you have going in? What were you curious about?

I was curious about a music biopic that was about a rock star watching Terrence Malek's Badlands. Yes. Being in the spot. Great taste. Yeah, very solitary movie. It's trying to do this thing where it's a zoom in instead of a Cradle to Grave movie. I think this one seems to be trying to potentially have it both ways in that it is a very narrow story about a critically beloved Springsteen album, but not the biggest Springsteen album. And yet it has these black and white flashbacks over and over again to his semi-traumatic childhood, not that dramatic, at least in this film, which is an interesting wrinkle. And then it has big hits, both both from before he started recording Nebraska and the songs like Born in the USA that he started writing while recording Nebraska. You get a little bit of both where it is a little bit more quiet and direct and specific, but you still have all these Springsteen trappings and Easter eggs for the real fans. You want to know why I did what I did.

Sir, I guess it's just a meanness in this world. The album, Nebraska. It is a, as I said, it's dark, it's lofi, pretty quiet, pretty interior, which the film mirrors in its own way the vibe of that album.

A very quiet film. Yeah.

I think we got that.

Oh, yeah, we got that one.

So this song got a name?

I was going to call it stark weather, but now I'm thinking Nebraska. Lindsay, are you a Nebraska person?

I am. I'm a Bruce person, generally. I'm a dirt bag from New Jersey, so he means a lot to me. You've interviewed Bruce. I have I have interviewed Bruce.

Which not a lot of people on Earth can say, I think.

That's true. I have interviewed Bruce. I think that for all of these reasons, I'm keeping my expectations low. I haven't seen the film yet. But generally with biopics, I think the bigger a fan you are and the closer you are to that artist, the more potential there is for disappointment, for having too precious a relationship to that artist, and you're only seeing what's not there. You're fact-checking it in real-time. I think the less familiar you are often with an artist, the more successful a biopic can be for just telling a story. I think I can see myself getting a little caught up in the details of this and just going a little too Bruce nerd about it. It's an interesting choice to focus the film on the creation of this album rather than something like Born in the USA or Born to Run.

Absolutely. I mean, it is definitely a counterintuitive choice, and I'm very curious to see how fans receive it, to see how the general public receives it. As an Oscar nerd, I'm certainly curious to see whether or not Jeremy Allen White's performance as Bruce Springsteen or Jeremy Strong's performance as John Landau, his manager, whether or not those get any nods from the academy. Joe, what did you think of Jeremy Allen White?

Yeah, that's a guy who did some singing that sounds like Bruce Springsteen. I think there is a real authenticity play with these movies in general, but specifically in something like this, which, again, with the choice of focusing on Nebraska, is saying, We're doing a little bit of an art house thing with this. I think Jeremy Allen White, a professional broader, whether he's cooking or wearing Calvin Klein's on the top of a skyscraper, what he does is brood, and I think that allows him to inhabit Bruce. I think the Jeremy Strong character has a little bit more potential because unless you're like Lindsay and I and have spent a lot of time writing and reporting on music and focus on the lore of the background figures, John Landau doesn't have of this mythic omnipresence that Bruce Springsteen does.

I mean, one of the things, again, I feel like with this one and the Bob Dylan movie from last year, A Complete Unknown, I remember talking to the director of that movie, James Mangold, and he was talking about how he was attempting to not make this, your typical biopic. And he would know because he made Walk the Line, in which Waukeen Phoenix plays Johnny Cash many, many years ago. And I I want to talk about what we think characterizes your classic, your classical music biopic, because you have to have a form to divert from. Lindsay, tell me about the beats that a music biopic has to hit.

Well, we need to know where the artist comes from, both a sense of place, and as we're talking with Bruce, a sense of perhaps familial trauma, a core memory that sets them on the path to expressing themselves in music. We need to see the early artistic awakening happening. Prodigiousness? Yeah, the early inklings of their becoming a musician in some way. Then there's arguably the most exciting and fun part. Sometimes it's a great montage, but the rise to success. You can really have fun with that beat, I think.

Shooting up the charts. You see the camera pan over the billboard chart.

We need an arrow going up.

It's like the version of a spinning newspaper telling you the headline. Yeah.

Then perhaps success is not all it's cracked up to be. There's that beat. Sometimes that involves some substance abuse, other problems.

A news getting left behind, perhaps.

Yeah, a big third act conflict. Then I think we we land either with death, if the person is no longer around, and posthumous canonization, or you have to figure out some moment of triumph where they get back on the stage after they've been kicked down and show that they are a true musician and a worthy subject of a triumphant biopic.

Good God, that was perfect.

You were also- Someone hired me to If I could read your script and provide notes, I would be happy to be- You were also just doing Walk Hard Beat for Beat.

Oh, yeah. You were reading the script of Walk Hard, the er-parody of a musician biopic, which many thought had invalidated the need for any future biopics, and yet here we are.

No, that capitalism returns to the mean. It's just like, we don't acknowledge that anymore. That movie came after Walk the Line, which was the biopic about Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, and Ray, which was the movie in which Jamie Fox played Ray Charles, in which both of them lost siblings when they were a child, which is why in the movie Walk Hard, in which John C. Reilly plays an up and coming rock and roll star, he accidentally cuts his brother in half with a machete.

Dewey, I'm cutting half pretty bad.

In case you all don't make it, then you have be double great for the both of us.

It is the trauma that haunt him for the rest of his life. Yes. The music biopic has been around for quite a while. I just do a little research, and there was a period in the '50s in which You had the Glenn Miller story, the Jean Krupa story.

The Hank Williams story.

And the Betty Goodman story. So this was a thing which I think Jimmy Stewart played.

All of them.

All of them, yes. So we've had these forever, but it really, I think, hit this moment where we can easily rattle off the beats like you just did so wonderfully, Lindsay, with those two movies, Ray, which came out in 2004, and Walk the Line, which followed in 2005. And I'm wondering, what do you think it is about that very predictable outline, beat-for-beat movie experience that seems to continue to appeal to people? Because we're going to talk about some movies that did not work, but there are a lot of these movies that people just go to, they know what they're getting, and they still want to see it.

I have an economic argument, which is that I think these movies that you're talking about came in a fallow period for the record business. This was like the end of the CD era, music sales peak in 1999, 2000. File sharing comes. Everything is very now, now, now. And These movies are always a good way for the people who own this music to point back to the catalog, especially for a new generation, and say, Hey, ever heard of this guy, Johnny Cash? Ray Charles? Pretty cool cats.

Go buy these box sets. Yeah, they got some greatest hits albums, too, if you need a primary.

States of Dead Musicians, combined with the rights holders or licensors in the record business, can come together as a conglomerate and say, How do we best sell this icon, both to superfans, people who already love them, and introduce their music to new audiences. So, Ray Charles, at the end of his life, he was winning Grammy Awards that were controversial. I remember as a teenager at that time when Ray Charles was being fedded in this way that felt very manufactured to a cynical teenager. I was rejecting all of this stuff out of hand. I was saying, Sure, Ray Charles might be an amazing musician, but stop trying to shove this IP down my throat, though I did not yet know the term. You did not call it that. I did not yet know the term that would come to define culture in our lifetimes.

Because this is musical intellectual property. We think of IP in terms of superhero movies, in terms of franchises, but you are selling Bob Dylan IP to an audience, essentially. Sure.

One thing I'll add on the more film industry side of it is that Walk the Line and Ray both produced Oscar-winning performances. Reese Witherspoon wins for playing June Carter Cash, and Jamie Fox wins for playing Ray Charles. You get this added level of prestige, too, if you're an actor looking for an Oscar-worthy role, a studio that wants to have a best picture contender. It also has that appeal to the film industry, too.

Absolutely. I mean, the Academy loves to award actors playing real people, just in general. If you look from Oppenheimer to Churchill to Lincoln to Margaret Thatcher to whoever, right? But there is this, if you just go back and look at Oscar history from the past 30 years, there is this way in which a musical performance is going to get you at least nominated. You're not always going to win. But if Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles.

Loretta Lynn.

Yeah, and then going back- Billy holiday.

Before. The real-life composer, Lydia Tar. Obviously.

Most importantly, Lydia Tar robbed for her Oscar.

But it is. It feels like a shortcut in in a way.

Sure.

Yeah. There is also a way in which it allows actors to do a thing, which is maybe sing. Maybe they're not. But if you are singing like Timothée Chalamey did, like Jimmy Allen-White did, you can sell that as, I worked hard for this performance.

Learning to play an instrument, just any stunt that then becomes the driving force of campaign. It's like losing an extreme amount of weight or putting on some crazy prosthetics. If you can learn to mimic the magical skills of a legendary musician, then you are somehow transcending the craft of acting.

Sure. I think to go back to the question of why these movies appeal, though, they're aspirational stories, which are always going to have an audience. Especially the showing the birth to success story, a lot of these are people transcending pretty modest roots and finding their talent that allows them to... It's a classic pull yourself up by your bootstraps, American tale. The hero's journey of music stories.

This applies outside of biopics, fictionalize music stories, the behind the music run, again, where everyone knows the shape of the arc. That familiarity, I think works twofold in these cases when it's about very famous musicians in that the songs themselves are familiar, the people are familiar, and the beats are familiar, and then put that together and you get a crowd pleaser. I do think it's not a coincidence that even in the streaming era, the most documentaries we see are also about music or sports, two things that follow these very set paths paths and have built-in fan bases to flock to the content about pulling back the current.

How much of the appeal is just going to see the songs that you remember or like in a movie theater? That's certainly the appeal for me, right? Maybe I was always going to see last year's Bob Dylan movie, but I went. I was like, Oh, thank you for reminding me the most obvious thing in the world, which is that there are many Bob Dylan songs that are amazing, and it's wonderful to hear them loud in a very good movie theater.

When I saw Bohemian Rhaps, the woman next to me sang the whole time, and it was actually an awful experience. It was worse than the movie itself, in my opinion. I'm very sorry for that. It's okay, but I think that's not a terribly uncommon experience in some of these biopics with more musical numbers and things like that. There is this communal aspect. It's almost like going to a concert. I think Bohemian Rhaps, in particular, the real The set piece of that is the really just verisimilitude of restaging the Live Aid performance. An artist who is maybe someone you can't see in concert anymore because they're not around anymore, in the case of Freddie Mercury, in a way, going to a biopic in a theater is the closest you can come to having that live communal concert experience.

Don't erase Adam Lambert's He'll get his own biopic someday, I hope.

You're absolutely right.

Bohemian Rhaps, too. The Adam Lambert story.

Yes.

I think you're right because I, again, back to the Bob Dylan movie from last year, I was not nearly alive when he went electric and whether or not everything that happened in the depiction of that moment in the movie at the Newport Folk Festival is actually accurate. I don't know that that many people punched each other. There's still something to, wow, I am seeing something that looks great, sounds great, and I feel like I am in the moment. Sure.

In that case, Dylan infamously does not play his songs straightforward in concert anymore. Or ever. I was just talking about this with someone this weekend.

Why I never want to see Bob Dylan live for this.

I mean, there's many other reasons to see Bob Dylan live now. It is awesome, but you're not going to get the album familiar arrangement of Flowing in the Wind.

I actually thought that the real win for A Complete Unkown was exactly that, how crowd-pleasing it was. It did a really expert job of taking this mythic figure who has a ton of music, not all of which is equally beloved, and it really boiled down not only the greatest hits and picking the most obvious stuff, but deploying it pretty well. When he plays Blown in the Wind, you can get chills because it feels new, even though you've probably heard this song a million different times. How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? But both the songs they focused on, usually the best ones, the crowd-pleasiest ones, the ones agreed upon to be the classics, and then even which sections of those songs they use. I'm really fixated on the editing of the songs in a complete unknown. It's just the best parts of the best songs. I thought that was a really good way to both remind people that, Hey, I know there's a lot of noise around this guy, but at the core of it, it's just bangers, and also introducing those songs to a Timothée Chalamet audience.

Right.

Have you found, whether yourselves or anecdotally, people in your lives, do you feel like these movies send people back to the music? I definitely found like I went through a month of just going back and listening to early Dylan after watching this movie. Not songs I was unfamiliar with, but I hadn't really dug down on them in a while, and the movie just compelled me in that direction.

Well, yeah, I think that goes back to Joe's point about the estate, thanks you.

I don't think we would continue getting as many of these as we do if it It didn't work in that way. Sure. I'm sure streams go up, especially when these movies become successful. I think we're focusing a lot on Complete Unkown because that was a real win, I think, for the genre after something like Rocket Man and Bohemian Rhapsody, which were successful in various ways, but I think a bit more polarizing. But the Dylan thing, I think, really broke through. One of the reasons I knew it did was when there started to be TikToks about, Oh, my God, this guy, Bob Dylan, or, How about this situationship between Joan Baez and Bob Dylan? I actually, after the movie, made a playlist called Bobby and Joni. That's just all their songs about each other, one after the other in chronological order.

I'm going to need you to share that. Is that a public playlist?

I can make it public for this podcast.

I think that also gets to the point that there's something generation bridging about these two. It's a way, at its best, for parents to share their music with their kids and show that once I and this person, whose music I admire, were young, too. There was something a little youthful and rebellious about this person that you think of as just this old established figure now. I think it helps that. I've definitely watched some of these movies with my parents, and I'm sure that's a common experience, or people showing them to their children and stuff, and then sharing that music in a way that feels like a bonding experience.

It can go in the inverse, too. I'm thinking of when 8 Mile or Get Rich or Die Try in the 50 Cent film came out in the early 2000s at the peak of M&M and '50s powers. That worked in a legitimizing sense where you could say, Oh, you think M&M is making little white kids too rebellious? But look at this movie. He comes from a factory town, and he really made it out. I think that there's Probably a lot of parents from that era who learned something about rap music from these commercial endeavors.

Yeah.

I want to talk about performances because it feels like many of these movies live or die based on who is playing the person in the title. I watched this week in a movie that I had avoided, to be honest, which was Elvis, which was the Boz Lerman film, telling you about the life of Elvis Presley, but also telling you about his relationship with his longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker, played by a man who I love.

And out of his mind, Tom Hanks.

But who I think is absolutely terrible in this movie. No offense to Tom Hanks.

Well, some offense to Tom Hanks. He made some choices.

The accents.

The many accents.

Makeup. I watched this movie, Elvis, and I don't really want to see it. I actually am grappling with turning it off. But Austin Butler, as Elvis, was so compelling that I pushed through to the end of this- Extremely long involved movie. This long and not very good movie.

Austin Butler. I don't know. It's like- Half good.

Half great.

You watched it. If it's good, it's because of Austin Butler, who I think at one point, I may have mentioned this before, I said to myself at 11 o'clock at night, Is this the most beautiful person that's ever been on screen?

Which is what you're supposed to feel when you watch Elvis.

Sure. Mission accomplished. I think that's an interesting casting one because with the casting of these films, it's the tension between, do we get the person that looks uncannily like the person they're playing, or do we take some liberties but find the person that can most project the aura? I think that was something that worked for me about Austin Butler playing Elvis. He doesn't look anything like Elvis, and you're not sitting there doing the thing you're doing and say a complete unknown, where you're like, I'm seeing an overlay of Dimitri Chalmet and Bob Dylan. You just are focused on the performance of Austin Butler playing this incredibly charismatic, beautiful person. The That film has, because it's so stylized and so over the top in all it's doing, there is a lot of artifice about it. It's not going for that authenticity in the way that, say, the Springsteen movie, it sounds like is. I think that's something that works. That's a choice where they didn't get the guy that looks the most like Elvis, but that's okay. In some ways, that actually even makes the performance more convincing Yeah.

I think it helped that people didn't have a ton of baggage with Austin Butler. Sure. I like when an unknown plays a very- A complete unknown? Plays a very well-known person, and that allows the entrance of them and their star light turning on to really land because there's that early scene in the film, Austin Butler's first performance as Elvis in an auditorium full of young women, and he comes out and he has the crazy eyeliner on.

The incredible pink suit.

Yes. And he's really, really, really making his debut, both as Elvis, but also for the world.

You may go When the women's heads are almost literally exploding, and they're turning into puddles, and they're screaming and tearing each other apart to get closer to him, and his mom is just like, Oh, my God, what is going to happen to my boy?

And you're like, Yeah. Like, yes, the aura is off the charts. It doesn't matter that the rest of the movie is completely ridiculous because it nails the heart of the thing that made Elvis good, which is not just looking and sounding like Elvis. It's embodying the of Elvis.

There is that type of performance in which you're trying to convey to the audience the spirit of the person. Then there are performances in which the person really tries to go for more of a mimic type performance. I don't know if we would consider walking Phoenix and walk the line to fall into that category. But, particularly because Johnny Cash has such a distinct voice.

Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.

Really trying to hit that voice, really really trying to hit the clothes, the hair, everything.

Definitely Ray Charles, the Jamie Fox performance. Well, I got to walk way over town.

It's good to meet.

Oh, yeah.

I'm thinking like Val Kilmer in the doors, really, really, really trying to nail Morison.

They go on stage and howl for people.

Me, they see exactly what they want to see. Jennifer Lopez as Selena. First of all, I would like to thank my family. I think that's a big one where it's like, I'm both making my debut and I'm really looking and sounding like this person. That has the best of both, I think, in that sense.

I'd especially like to thank the fans because without you, we'd be nothing.

Thank you.

Then you have the really weird twists where the person plays themselves. I mentioned 8 Mile, M&M playing a version of himself, Purple Rain, which we've gone this far without talking about, in which Prince plays a version of himself.

Well, for starters, you have to purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. What? You have to purify yourself in Lake Minnetonka.

That can really work if it's done at the right moment.

I think a recent version of that that I really liked was the Kneecap movie. I don't know if anyone saw that. Okay. The Irish rap group.

Tell us about that one.

Kneecap, the imperiled, shall we say, Irish rap group. Played themselves in this movie that came out, I think, last year. It's a dramatization of their origin story, but they're really good on camera. At being themselves? Yeah.

When I said I booked as a gig, what I meant was my uncle Potter said we could play in his bar if I sorted some old folks' smoke for his gout. Jj only agreed that DJ if he could set up his decks in the store cupboard, just in case he was spotted any pupils.

My boyfriend thought that at least one of them was a hired actor. After we were talking about it, and was like, No, That guy, he's actually the DJ in the band. I think that was one where that was a group that I didn't know much about. I didn't know their backstory, but them playing themselves and presenting their story to a new audience, for me, it worked.

You also have something that is, for obvious reasons, pretty rare, but a relative of the person playing one of the people, most famously in the past few years, O'Shea Jackson playing his father in the movie, straight out of Compton.

If America's Most Wanted blew up, you pay me the advance for the follow-up. Now, is that not what the you said?

That is what I said.

But it is more complicated than that, Q. Right there are metrics-Come on, Brian. I got a baby on the way. And the house I just paid for up the strength of what you told me. I mean, you gave me your word.

Q, would you just calm down?

C calm down. The movie that spawned a million T-shirts.

A Million. Parody.

Straight out of wherever. Yeah, straight out of blank.

Wherever. Yeah. That's one where you get a little bit of Easter egg out of the sun and obviously the resemblance, which is there. The voice helps also. But that, I don't know that you can really get a ton of mileage out of that if the movie itself isn't working. People like Shadr Compton. It made a lot of money, I think, because there wasn't that much like it. You don't often get these serious, recent-ish history rap biopics. They come in clumps. There was a notorious B. I. G. One that flopped in the late '80s. It came out a little bit before Shade Out of Compton, which then became this big hit. Then immediately after, you have something like the Tupac one, which again just came and went.

We've really focused on rock biopics, country biopics. Do you think that there is a reason that more hip hop biopics are not made or not successful?

I think it's probably the obvious answer, which is that hip hop has long been underrated for its commercial abilities. There's white executives in charge of largely white companies. I think that there's just less appetite. I think the reason we get a lot of movies about boomer icons is because a lot of boomers are making these decisions of what gets made. It stems all the way back to publishing. A lot of these movies are based on books. There are way more books about Bob Dylan than there are probably about all rappers put together. Yeah. The source material is also severely lacking.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some biopics that really mess with the form. We'll be right back.

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Play on. All right. I'd love to get into a few biopics that are unexpected, that are not what we been talking about, which is the Cradle to Grave depiction of a Musician's Life. I would love to start with one that I saw at this point so many years ago. It is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was directed by Todd Haynes. This tells the story of Karen Carpenter, essentially through Barbies. It's just a bunch of Barbies showing how difficult her life was, how she dealt with.

Incredible movie. I remember pirating this as a young person.

Yeah, exactly. It is How she dealt with anorexia and other issues. It was a movie that the Carpenter estate, of course, was not interested in approving because of how negatively it depicted all the people around her. As a result, it uses all the Carpenter's music, but it's not something you could really legally watch. But it was fascinating, certainly for me as a, I don't know, 19-year-old college student to think that there are... After having seen La Bamba and Selena when I was up in movies that were very stereotypical biopics that you could actually just be completely wild and do something like this. It's amazing. What are some other movies, some music biopics that have been surprising to either of you?

Well, I think you really put your finger on the fulcrum here, which is, is the musician or the musician's estate participating in the film? I think if something is authorized, if something is collaborative, which is often the way that they get the rights to use the music. To have a music biopic, you need the big songs. To have the big songs, you need the participation of whoever wrote and performed them. That often means they're going to have approval over the script, they're going to have approval over the marketing, someone is going to be keeping a very close eye on this IP, the workaround is to fudge it. Either you don't use the music. There's a little scene, Jimi Hendrix biopic, in which Andre 3000 Outkast plays him with no Jimi Hendrix music. Instead, it has him covering the Beatles in front of the Beatles, which is something that really happened, but that's the climactic moment because I don't have access to any actual Jimi songs. I think movies that are really inspired by musicians or their stories, but can composite a bunch of different acts from that same era and skirt the rules of authorisation with the understanding that that means they won't have the songs you know and love can be really successful.

I'm thinking of Last Days, which is the Gus Van Sant movie that is very obviously about Kurt Cobain and his suicide.

What's going on at the house anyway? Who's all over there? What do you guys do all the time? Are you going to play the two?

It's going to be a shame if you don't make these days. It's this very, very eerie, quiet, dark, art house look at one of the biggest rock stars of the 1990s. On the flip side of that, Alex Ross-Perry made a movie called Her Smell a handful of years ago. How can I be expected to grow a- That is a cobbled together version of a lot of female '90s rock stars, both from the grunge era and riot Girl. You might see some Courtney Love in there. You might see a little bit of Kathleen Hannah in there. But it is a fictional version that feels truer to that world or that life or even those characters than someone actually trying to impersonate them.

Lindsay, do you have a couple of suggestions on movies that mess around with what we expect from a biopic?

Yeah. I mean, my favorite movie about Bob Dylan is not about Bob Dylan at all. It's Inside Lou and Davis, the Coen Brothers movie from about a decade ago. I rewatched that after seeing a Complete Unkown, and it actually made me appreciate Inside Lou and Davis that much more. It's the story, essentially, of not the winner of music history, Bob Dylan, but a loser, someone, this made-up musician who essentially represents the many people in the Greenwich Village folk scene who did not become Bob Dylan, who did not find the success that he did.

How's the music going?

Pretty good.

Pretty good. Good. So you don't need to borrow money. Actually, I was wondering.

And in telling the story of the loser, it's a much more compelling and unfamiliar narrative. It also has a great performance by Oscar Isaac, but you're not... The fact that he's playing a fictional musician, you're not, again, doing that thing where it's like, Oh, does he look enough like him? You're just fully in the story. I think it's a really beautiful film, and there is, not to spoil the ending, but Bob Dylan himself, a fictionalized version of Bob Dylan.

He's in the post-credit sequence to tease the sequel. Yeah, exactly. Outside The old style?

Outside the window. But I think that's one where sometimes telling the story around the more familiar story is a more satisfying film. I think another fictionalized one that does that in a more crowd-pleasing way is That Thing You Do, which is a movie not about the Beatles. At all.

About a band with a song better than a Beatles song.

I'll leave that there. Half joking.

If Tom Hanks did it wrong in Elvis, he certainly did it right with That Thing You Do, which he started in, and he wrote, and he directed. He did it so right in That Thing You Do.

Oh, he did it so right. Yeah.

That twist, that trick of following the loser is, I think, a great frame for a biopic that can be about a legend but not get bogged down in the details. I'm thinking also of Amadeus, which tells the Mozart story through Salieri, his peer who's obsessed with him and hates him because he's a mediocrity, as he calls it, and can't believe what it's like to be in the presence of this idiot be it genius?

The only trouble is no one will hire me. They all want to hear me play, but they won't let me teach their daughters as if I was some a fiend.

It takes the air out of Mozart in this way where you're expecting this looming all-knowing genius, and instead you get this pervert with an annoying giggle, and you have Salieri being like, I can't believe that this work is coming from this guy for almost three hours, following The Loser. Also, one of my favorite music movies, Eiden, a French film by Mia Hanson Love, which tells the story of somebody on the periphery of Daft Punk, of the '90s French electronic music scene.

.

You get flashes of them, but you're following a guy who doesn't make it. That, I think, can tell you more about the world that these people are coming from and just freeze up the storytelling and the filmmaking. I come back to this question a lot with a movie like the Dylan one, which I enjoyed, and also with the Springsteen one, which is like, does this need to exist? Does it have any artistic value outside of the art that we already have? Even the Elvis movie, the choice to make Colonel Parker the vantage of the film and Elvis as this specter in the background, that's cool to me.

Yeah, I think that was the part of Elvis that I actually thought didn't work. But I think it gets at another tension that in trying to narrativize these stories, you have to have a love story. You have to have some interpersonal thing. I think the problem with the Elvis movie was that it overestimated how much people care about Colonel Tom Parker.

Well, especially in the way that Tom Hanks chose to play him.

So like, tripled down on that. Then I think that's not necessarily the most interesting emotional arc of his life. But trying to find that foil, like you mentioned Amadeus and the unconventional use of a rather poor Salieri first. He's just a pathetic guy. Yeah, that movie did him dirty. But having to find that foil, is it a love story? Is it me against the label? But finding that antagonist, not necessarily a villain, but what's what's the core love story? Did you like Priscilla?

The Sofia Coppola movie about Priscilla Presley?

I was mixed on that, but I was fascinated by... Did that come out the same year as Elvis? Yeah, or soon after. It was very close to the different choices. Austin Butler is Elvis in Elvis. Pure sex. Yes. Then Jacob Alorty plays him like a total himbo, even more so than Austin Butler's.

Pure blank brood.

Yeah, which was a fascinating choice. I think I understand, again, why the Elvis estate was not as happy with that film, perhaps. But I like the plurality of that. I like coming at the story from different vantage points. Obviously, telling Elvis's story through the eyes of his very young, at the time, wife, was a refreshing choice that I think those two movies in conversation or present some interesting tension.

When you talk about different vantage points, there's I'm not there. This is another way to come at Dylan, and it's to come at Dylan from a bunch of different directions as little vignettes. You have Kate Blanchet playing the most literal version of him, but of course, Kate Blanchet is a woman, so that's a little bit of a twist.

Is it true you no longer sing protest songs?

Who said that?

I didn't say that. I read somewhere that you no do the protest thing.

Well, that's all I ever do is protest. Do you? And then you have Bob Dylan as Small Black Child. You have Bob Dylan as Outlaw Richard Gear. What do you think of the abstract take on a legend like that?

I think this is one of the great music biopics. It's certainly not not for everyone. It is also directed by Todd Haynes, an art house director. It is a fractured portrait of a man and a musician who purposefully has tried to make himself unknowable to his fans and to the world at large. And so the strategy of picking Kate Blanchard, as you say, depicting him during those years that we saw in the Black and White documentary that was made about Dylan, you have Christian Bale doing a version of Bob Dylan, Heath Ledger, Ben Wishaw, Richard Gear. It's one of the smartest, if not always totally legible or crowd-pleasing decisions that I've ever seen in terms of how to make a different story about a musician.

It makes you understand the guy, which is a very impressive feat. It's a real tightrope walk that he does where you're not learning plot points in his life, but you're understanding who he is and where he comes from, spiritually, dare I say?

We cannot leave this topic without talking about some of the parodies that have been made. We touched briefly on Walk Hard, the Dewey Cox story, which stars John C. Reilly, and it's just so funny. But there's another movie I know that we are all fans of.

Yes, I did rewatch Popstar, Never Stop Stopping. Never Stop, Never.

Never Stop, Never. No. It's Popstar, Never Stop, Never Stop.

Never Stop, Never Stop.

We're leaving this in. Never Stop, Never Stopping. This is Andy Samberg, Connor for Real. A Justin Bieber, basically a rap-influenced white pop star who starts in a Beastie Boys-ish group and goes solo. This is a mockumentary. I think that we've skirted around the other elephant in this room, which is that there are a ton of really amazing music documentaries about basically all of the people we've talked about. Obviously, Don't Look Back, the canonical Bob Dylan film, and then No Direction Home, the later one by Martin Scorsese, et cetera. I do think it's interesting that one of the best music biopics ever made is a fake documentary about a fake musician. But just nails. And spinal tap, too.

Like in the tradition. And spinal tap, of course, yes.

And many others along the way. But there's something so both specific about pop star. It's really nailing the mid 2010's version of pop culture, featuring real musicians, doing talking head interviews about a made-up musician. The industry parody is just so It's such a fine point on it. It's really, really lacerating but also loving and just knowledgeable and accurate. What can we even say? Are we allowed to play a little bit of one of these songs or are we just going to have to bleep the whole thing?

Incredible thoughts.

We made a new song at the farm. We found Lawrence's journals and they were just amazing. Amazing. Just full of incredible thoughts. Just like ideas and poem and stuff. Nothing special. Then Connor had the idea to take a piano line for my solo shit. Connor put it all together. The Puppies paired us with the craziest special guest to perform with.

Incredible thoughts, incredible mind.

But the songs are so funny.

That's the main point. It's the Lonely Island, guys. You You get the satisfaction of the spinal tap narrative arc, but then you get some Lonely Island digital shorts in the middle with star-studded musical cameos as well. It's great.

I think we should talk very quickly about a few biopics that are on the way. Again, this is a tried and true source of story for Hollywood. There's a Michael Jackson movie coming. There's a Brittany Spears movie that is in development.

Based on her Based on the memoir, The Woman and Me.

There's a Joni Mitchell biopic directed by Cameron Crow or that he is working on. Then there is also the most fascinating biopic experiment, possibly ever, that's coming in several years.

The Ur biopic.

Yes. Do you want to tell us about this?

The Ur biopix.

The- The biopix, yes.

We're talking about Sam Mendes, Beatles. What's not a trilogy, what's the four? What's the four? What comes after?

The quadrillegy?

The quadrillegy. We're going to learn when these movies come out.

It's the BCU, the Beatles Cinematic Universe.

There we go. Peter Jackson started it. Sam Mendes is continuing it. Yes.

This is four different biopics, one for each Beatle. The casting is pretty brilliant, I would say. It's incredible. I think they got it right. Paul Mescal is playing Paul McCartney. Joseph Quinn is George Harrison, Barry Keoghan playing Ringo Star. Love that. And Harris Dickinson as John Lennon. So not trying to name drop.

No, go.

But I did interview Ringo Star this summer. Yes. Congratulations. Thank you. And when I was talking to my dear friend, talking to my dear friend Ringo about this, actually. And he was saying, even having read the script of at least his film and given some notes on it, he was like, I don't know how they're going to do this because so many things. We're all in the same room. This happened to all of us. He's like, Are we going to get the same scene from my perspective? Like the Roshamont version?

Yeah, it's going to be weapons, but about the Beatles. I I think there will be, at some point, some weave together cut. There's going to be a four-hour cut of this movie. You're going to be able to see whether soon after the four, it released individually or 20 years later when some film student makes it work.

Sure, the get back of its time. But I think it's a brilliant idea, both economically, because they get to make four times the profit if you got to see them all.

But it's going to be so sad when the Ringo movie makes less than all the rest of them.

No, the Ringo movie is going to be the highest grossing of all. You're calling it now? Yeah.

Lindsay is going to go 10 times. I'll see you back here.

Yeah. No, for real. I think they're actually all going to be released theatrically the same month. It's a lot of Beatles in one month, but I think there's a huge market, obviously, for Beatles biopics, and this will really be a test of that.

We are going to take a break, and when we come back, as we always do, we're going to play a game. Let's go.

Yay.

We are approaching the end of the show, and that means, as always, it is time for our weekly quiz. We've talked about a lot of biopics today, but Hollywood really, really loves to make these movies. There are many, many more that we didn't even get to talk about today. So I'm going to test your knowledge on the wider world of Musician Biopics. There are three rounds. Please put your fingers on your buzzers. Round one is called Appetitle for Destruction. I'm going to give you the name of a biopic, and you tell me what Musician it's about. Behind the Candelabra. Lindsay.

Oh, my God, I'm blanking. No, the pressure got to me. Oh, Liberace. Liberace, that is correct. I would be so bad on Jeopardy. You just did the Mozart giggle.

I know, I did. Okay. Born to be blue. Joe, for real.

I don't know, but I'm guessing Miles Davis.

Incorrect. This is Chet Baker. This movie stars Ethan Hawke. Oh, wow. Okay, next. Control. Joe.

Joy Division.

Who in Joy Division?

Ian Curtis.

Ian Curtis, correct. The lead singer of Joy Division. Next. Get on up.

Joe. James Brown.

James Brown. This stars Chadwick Boseman the godfather of soul. Next. Till the Clouds Roll By.

Deep cut. I don't know it.

Pass. This is the composer Jerome Kern.

You got a biopic? Good for him. You know what? Good for him.

Final question in this category. Bound for glory.

Oh, I know this.

Sorry, you guys should not study. This is Woody Guthrie.

David Carradine, right?

I don't All right. Ready? Next round. Round two, Sergeant Pepper's Clownly Heart Club Band. I'm going to give you the names. What was the pun there? Clownly Heart Club Band.

I still don't have it.

I'm going to explain it to you, and then you will get the pun. I'm going to give you the names of two actors. Got it. And you tell me what musician they have both portrayed on screen.

Good.

Jack White and Jacob Alorty. Lindsay. Elvis. Elvis Presley. Jack White played him in Walk Hard, Jacob Alorty and Priscilla. Next. David Carradine and Scoot McNairy. Joe. Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie. Thanks. Caradine in Bound for Glory, which we just mentioned, and Scoot McNerry in a Complete Unkown, in which he did not speak once. Next. Jennifer Hudson and Cynthia Irivo.

Who Who is it?

Lindsay.

Aretha Franklin?

Aretha Franklin.

Oh my gosh.

Hudson in respect and Arevo in genius, Aretha. Diana Ross and Andraday. Lindsay. Aretha Franklin? Aretha Franklin. Oh my gosh. Hudson in respect, and Arevo in genius, colon Aretha. Diana Ross and Andraday. Lindsay. Billy holiday. Billy holiday. Diana Ross in Ladies Sing the Blues in Day in the United States versus Billy Halley. Final question in this category. John Cusack and Paul Dano. Joe.

Oh, God.

What? You rang in without knowing it.

I knew it, and then I lost it. You lost it.

I lost it.

Can I steal?

Yeah, steal it.

Brian Wilson.

Brian Wilson. They both played Brian Wilson in the film Love and Mercy. Paul Dano was young Wilson. John Cusack was old Wilson. Not a good movie. All right. I'd say half of it. You're just bitter.

I am bitter.

Round three, Me and My Shadow. Me and My Shadow. All right, I'm I'm going to play you a clip of a famous song. You tell me if it's the actual artist singing it or an actor playing the artist. This is fun. First one. We're caught on a track. I can't walk Lindsay.

It's not the artist.

It is the artist. This is Elvis singing Suspicious Minds from a live show in Honalulu in 1973.

Could have sworn it. It was Austin Butler.

That is the point of the game. Next song. Lindsay.

That's Joaquin Phoenix.

That's definitely Joaquin Phoenix. That is Waking Phoenix playing Johnny Cash performing at Fulsome in the 2005 movie Walk the Live. Next song. Hello, Daddy. Hello, Mom. Joe.

That's the real one. Incorrect.

Oh. That's Kristen Steward. That's Kristen Steward. And Dakota Fanning from the 2010 movie, The Runaway Anyways, it is not Joan Chet and Sherry Curry. Next song.

Over the Rainbow. Joe.

Fake.

That is actually Judy Garland, not Renee Zellweiger. Man. This is a clip from Judy Garland's last public performance.

I was going to say, is Renee Zellweiger a better singer than Judy Garland? But it's just that it's her last performance ever.

This was just before she died. Have some respect for Judy Garland.

All right, all right, all right. You guys are real. These are tricky.

All right, a couple more. Once upon a time, you're just so fine.

That's Timmy.

Joe. Yes, that is Timmy Chalamet from the film A Complete I know.

I would know that voice anyway.

It's beautiful. Next song.

Lindsay.

That's J Lo.

No, that's Selena.

That is not J Lo. That is Selena. From a live concert at the Houston Astridome in 1995.

That is recreated.

The concert that is portrayed at the beginning of the film Selena. All right, next song.

Lindsay. That's The Doors.

Correct. Live on The Ed Sullivan Show. Next song. Well, sometimes I go out. Lindsay.

That's not Amy.

Correct. That is Marissa Abell. That ain't Amy Winehouse. That ain't Amy Winehouse.

It sounded all right, though.

All right. But Amy Winehouse didn't sound all right.

Final question of this round. Final question of the quiz.

Lindsay.

I don't know the guy's name, but it's not Elton John.

That is not Elton John. I don't know how we're going to score this. That is Taryn Eggerton. Okay. Playing out in John in 2019's Rocket Man.

Lindsay won.

Lindsay's O-Lads. You won the quiz. Congratulations.

I've never been proudder.

I have That was good. I have a thing for you.

That was good.

I have a thing for you in this bag here.

Wow, it comes in a bag. We've awarded- It's an Oscar nomination.

Oh my God. It is the eighth one of these that we have awarded. We call it the Gilby. It is a small golden plastic trophy that we bought in bulk and then pasted my face on.

This will have pride of place in my home.

Congratulations, Lindsay. It's beautiful. Congratulations, Lindsay. Thank you for coming on this week's episode of the Sunday Special.

Thanks for having me.

Joe Cascarelli. Wonderful, wonderful to see you here. Thank you so much.

It was fun. I will be back to redeem myself in the game.

You will.

If it's the last thing I do.

This episode was produced by Tina Antalini with help from Kate Lepresti, Luc Vandenploeg, and Alex Baron. We had production assistance from Dahlia Haddad. It was edited by Wendy Dore and engineered by Sophia Landman. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alishiba Itup, and Diane Wong. Special thanks to Paula Schumann. Thanks for listening. See you next week.