Biopic no thriller

Michael Jackson was a musical genius and an electrifying performer.

He was also a troubled man, his legacy marked by accusations of child sexual abuse. This new film — which starts in 1966 in his family’s working-class home in Gary, Ind., and ends in a triumphant performance at Wembley Stadium in 1988 — is hoping the truth of that first statement will cover over the inconvenient realities of the second.

As a meticulously re-created concert film, Michael is a thriller, with Jaafar Jackson (the singer’s nephew) delivering expert dance moves and convincing (digitally blended) vocals.

As a biopic, financed and overseen by the Jackson estate and several members of the late superstar’s family, it is rote, flat and friction-free.

That’s a foundational problem with Michael. Wherever you stand on the question of how to separate artist and art, however you feel about Jackson’s later legal issues, whatever you think about the controversies that have surrounded this production (requiring 22 days and US$15 million worth of reshoots), the musical biopic is a tricky genre. It is almost always doomed to follow a predictable rise-and-fall-and-rise-again narrative.

Michael can’t escape this clichéd setup. Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Equalizer flicks) delivers a technically polished product with a big-budget look, but he can’t overcome the clumsy, weak-kneed script from John Logan (Alien: Covenant).

“I want to be mysterious,” Michael announces at one point. And, yes, he remains unknowable in this movie-of-the-week-style account. Unfortunately, it’s in the blandest possible way.

The story starts with 10-year-old Michael (played first by gifted child actor Juliano Valdi) and four of his brothers as they are shaped into the Jackson 5.

The boys are driven by their controlling, angry and abusive father, Joseph (Sing Sing’s Colman Domingo), while their suffering, supportive mother, Katherine (Nia Long from The Best Man franchise), looks on.

We then jump ahead to 1979 and the release of Off the Wall. Michael (now played by Jaafar Jackson, Jermaine’s son) is clearly headed for solo stardom, even as he continues to live in the family’s California compound, which is darkened and dominated by his father’s ambitions.

Jaafar Jackson is magnetic when he’s playing Michael in rehearsal or onstage. Offstage, he gets the voice, the smile, the look, but his performance often has the uncanny feel of AI. It’s a collection of surfaces without substance, a cautious replication of outer life with barely a wisp of inner life suggested.

Maybe the script wants to suggest this is the inevitable result of Michael’s extreme fame and wealth and isolation, but it doesn’t have anything interesting to say about that phenomenon. Instead, this comes off as evasiveness, a reluctance to come to grips with Michael’s drives and desires.

Michael’s creative process is smoothed out to the affirmations he writes in notebooks and posts on the wall. (“Find your voice.” “Shine your light.”) His obsession with plastic surgery is incited by the pert nose of Peter Pan in his favourite book.

His plans for Neverland represent only his childlike sense of wonder, his imagined haven from his brutal father. There is almost no sense that Michael’s attempts to construct the childhood he never had, surrounding himself with toys and animals, might get darker.

In this sanitized, smoothed-over narrative, Michael has no internal demons whatsoever, only the external demon of his domineering dad.

Amid this ongoing father-son struggle, the movie delivers fan service with box-ticking efficiency, hitting the highs and lows MJ devotees will expect, from Bubbles the chimp to that ill-fated Pepsi commercial. But it doesn’t offer much we don’t already know.

This look at the King of Pop purports to go “beyond the music,” but it never ventures past safe, officially sanctioned lines.

Michael concludes with the Bad World Tour — and as a concert scene, it’s incredible — before flashing these words onscreen: “His story continues.”

For some fans, this will be a promise. For others, it might feel like an eerie reminder of everything this movie leaves out.

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