Ah, the great American musical biopic. Breathless jingoism and the whitest form of nationalism known to humanity: Yankee Doodle Dandy (about George M Cohan), The Glenn Miller Story, The Buddy Holly Story, and Night And Day (the Cole Porter story). With a few really notable exceptions, it’s a genre so culturally tricky yet uninviting that it can be placed somewhere between romcoms and those TikTok videos where young women lip sync to the speeches of senile politicians (weirdly popular during the pandemic).

As a film critic in the 90s and noughties, I lost hours trying to stop my glass eye from falling asleep: Walk The Line, Control, Ray, Backbeat, La Vie En Rose and Beyond The Sea to name a mediocre few. There were so many journeys on the road to genius. Their struggle. Their truth . . . pass me the saxophone-shaped sick bag.

I don’t do that job anymore. I now run a home for demented musical biopic filmmakers (all elderly white men of course) whose delusions seem to confine themselves to the fact that they once made a major contribution to cinema history.  Beside their tendency towards racism, victimhood and narratives that align personal triumph with commercial rather than creative gain, musical biopics compound all the things I don’t care about when I listen to music. Namely controversy, class credentials, sexuality, drug abuse and dodgy politics. Everyone knows that genius and psychopathy go hand in hand. 

I’m in no doubt that Morrissey, Ian Dury, Eric Clapton, Gary Glitter, John Lennon, The Eagles, Courtney Love, Chris Brown, James Brown and Phil Spector were/are a bunch of grade-A knobheads, but I still love listening to their music. I don’t need a rags-to-riches apologist arc to give me permission to separate the bigot/pervert/wife-beater/paedophile/neglectful parent (delete as applicable) from their mortal talent and art. 

So as I read that The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White could be donning a bandana to play The Boss or stare at stills of Timothée Chalamet on the set of Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (all corduroy, thick wool scarf and newsboy hat), I wonder if I’m really going to bother. For one thing, I’ve got a complete set of Dylan on vinyl. I could just listen to that and rewatch Todd Haynes’ brilliant experimental feature I’m Not There instead. A true, rare cinematic jewel. A celluloid gift of refraction and reflection on virtuosity and precocity.

You can’t track Paul Dale down on social media but you may well find him in a cinema that’s showing a John Cassavetes movie.