Note Worthy: MARIA, BETTER MAN,A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Musical biopics tend to work better when they’re working a thesis about the performer in question. It’s certainly preferable to a dutiful recounting of their life story that’s somehow less entertaining than finding the original concert footage and reading their Wikipedia page. In the case of Pablo Larraín’s Maria, the thesis about opera singer Maria Callas is somehow the same as the ones in his dreamy, subjective approaches to Jackie Kennedy in Jackie and Princess Diana in Spencer. The read on each figure is: look, how beautiful, how troubled, how resilient, how tragic. Fair enough. I happen to like those movies’ cramped opulence and grainy wooziness and temporal limits as acting showcases on a pedestal of swirling style. This one’s more of the same. It has Angelina Jolie lip-syncing to Callas’ diamond-cutting voice crackling with lyrical vibrato and tearful tremulousness. The film takes place largely in the singer’s final weeks as she struggles to regain her voice, seemingly wanting to sing more than live. There are also some flashbacks to a moment in her career during which she’s romanced by Aristotle Onassis. (An appearance by JFK hints at a Larraín biopic cinematic universe.) This funeral march uses Jolie’s contradictory qualities as well as any of her best non-Tomb Raider performances—Girl, Interrupted’s mental patient, By the Sea’s troubled wife, Maleficent’s wounded witch. She’s a stunning statuesque figure wielding sturdy charisma and steady fragility. The movie never quite fully activates an interesting narrative around Maria, but it consistently provides a beautiful look—Ed Lachman bringing faded cool colors in shooting a finely upholstered production design—and an enveloping mood. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours than hanging out with a movie star in lovely images that let one contemplate opera music.

An even more obvious thesis biopic is Better Man, an authorized recounting of Brit-pop’s bad boy Robbie Williams’ career so far. He came from a troubled family to join a 90’s boy band, and then go solo. It’s a typical arc from foundational childhood pain to fluke sudden success to sex, drugs, and gossip columns. What makes it atypical is the fact that he’s played here by a CG monkey in a musical that uses Williams’ songs to explain his emotional states. Who’d have thought, watching the recent motion-capture performances in the terrific recent Planet of the Apes films of the past decade, that one day the technology would be put to use for a metaphor of pop stardom? That it nearly works—sustaining its meager insight and mild visual interest for nearly the entirety of a feature length effort—is credit to director Michael Gracey. He gives it plenty of amped-up pizzazz in musical sequences with lots of extras, zippy editing, and fancy camera work. The best is a number stunningly done in a single stitched-together take that flows unblinkingly through multiple vehicles, buildings, and streets as talented dancers (and one animated monkey) hoof it with the right razzle-dazzle. Following up his fun debut feature The Greatest Showman, Gracey’s becoming the go-to guy for fantastical musicals that are more “inspired by” than factual accountings of a real person’s life. This one, though oddly more true, is not as good, because it’s bogged down in so many of the usual rise-fall-rise cliches and dreary dramatic scenes where dialogue expresses what the dancing could do and had done. Gracey’s strength, however, remains his emotional shorthand, which hits all the harder for flying so quickly it outraces its obviousness. It’s just more unevenly deployed here. And there’s only so much novelty to the monkey metaphor before it all feels overfamiliar again. It remains so purely metaphorical, with his simian appearance never acknowledged as real by anyone on screen, that it stretches its insight—he feels like a wild animal, or a trained zoo act—quite thinly. But Robbie Williams made some catchy pop songs, and there’s real earnest wildness here that keeps it from being entirely tiresome. If nothing else, looking at this monkey in all these standard biopic scenes certainly makes the sex part of sex and drugs weirder to contemplate.

A thesis about Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is that he’s ultimately unknowable, which could be a cheap trick to wiggle out of telling us anything about the man, but in practice makes his trickster inscrutability itself too vivid to ignore. All the best Dylan movies—Todd Haynes’ kaleidoscopic re-castings in I’m Not There, the self-contradictory interviews of classic verité doc Don’t Look Back—realize this. He’s both completely earnest and totally joking, a brilliant, purposeful writer and a persuasive crafter of public persona. Somehow he’s simultaneously earnestly artful and an impish improviser. He’s deliberately cultivating a mystique, and sometimes just a jerk. Either way he’s a poet and a genius and this movie is more about how people react to him than anything else. And then it pushes back with his own confusion about who others want him to be. That’s nice tension finely dramatized. The sturdy meat-and-potatoes Hollywood craft of this new film quite effectively communicates why people responded so strongly to his work, and why some would feel a sense of betrayal when he went electric. The movie ends with that divisive moment in his career, but begins with his arrival in the New York City folk music scene of the early 1960s, and follows his rise to fame before concluding with him trading his acoustic guitar for that electric one. Mangold, who also co-wrote with frequent Scorsese co-writer Jay Cocks, brings a fine sense of pacing and placing to the events, and fills the picture with loving recreations of the sights and sounds of the time, including tons of satisfying musical performances. It helps us understand how Dylan hit big, and returns to these old classics some of the shock of the new. We see him through the eyes of: folksy singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who takes him under his wing; sweet college activist Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who falls in love with him; sharp, ambitious Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who’s as much a collaborator and competitor as love interest; and various other music industry types who try to pin him down from managers and programmers to Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). (That means Mangold, whose Cash picture Walk the Line was two decades ago, also has a biopic universe at play.) Dylan himself is played by Timothée Chalamet in a proficient impersonation that also always seems like Chalamet putting on an act. Maybe that’s the point. So is Bob.