My notes on Michael (2026)
This biopic feels like a script for a MAD Magazine movie parody with pauses for the cynical rejoinders. Admittedly, it exposes a major issue with jukebox musical biopics – see also Bohemian Rhapsody, from the same stable – in that whoever controls the rights to the hit songs gets to set boundaries in the depiction of real-life characters and events. This is not only backed by the Jackson family but stars Michael Jackson’s nephew Jaafar in the lead – he might be the new Larry Parks! – and, in its only interesting angle, could be construed as a feature-length act of revenge against patriarch Joseph Jackson (Colman Domingo), who is presented as the kind of villain black actors don’t play any more except in films with all-black casts directed by Antoine Fuqua. Domingo and Jaafar Jackson are, within the confines of the script, really good and the machine-tooled biopic structure grinds on … tributes to the God-given talents of the hero from childhood to where the film chooses to leave off (1989) with ‘His story continues’. Is it even a subliminal nod to the fact that the star’s third act has been excised on legal grounds that the film ends with Jackson unironically claiming ‘I’m Bad’ … the British school playground response to ‘why did Michael Jackson call himself “Bad”?’ was ‘because he couldn’t spell “Pathetic”.’
We might wish for a Pablo Lorrain film about how Jackson was shaped and abused from infancy into the victim-monster-juggernaut he became in the 1980s and beyond but what we get are cartoonish moments as the kid pores over a storybook Peter Pan (very few words, big pictures) in which someone has written ‘Joseph’ over an illustration of Pan beating Captain Hook. It’s hard not to chortle as Michael acquires a series of pets – a rat (cue that song from ‘Ben’, after which I think his musical output was all downhill), a llama, a giraffe and Planet of the Apes refugee CG chimp in a nappy Bubbles – who eventually extend to a loyal human bodyguard (KeiLyn Durrel Jones) and manager (Miles Teller). We get biopic sketches of inspiration striking – a news report about the Crips/Bloods LA gang war which inspires MJ to settle that war with dance, clips from The Fly, Night of the Living Dead and House of Wax which lead to Thriller – to set up the needle-drop performance recreations. A rare actually witty line has MJ say he’s lying about paying attention to his muse because if he isn’t careful God will give the ideas to Prince.
It’s a story about a guy too cowed to tell his Dad off – this is as steeped in Daddy issues as any superhero origin story – who eventually gets his manager to dismiss Joseph by fax … who still goes along with the family brand until he gets his hair set on fire doing a Pepsi commercial, and then tells the world he’s going solo rather than break the news to wicked father and barely-characterised brothers. Random scenes have MJ interracting with fans, mostly kids, with a stress on visits to the worse-off children in the burns ward. A tiny moment early on suggests asexuality as one of the brothers is off on a date with a girl rather than being tempted by an invite to play Twister with the late-teens lonely prodigy – and all the peripheral women are mumsy, with Nia Long as the nurturing Mom who still goes along with the ogre until very late in the film, or absent altogether (didn’t Michael Jackson have a sister called Janet?).
I guess we’ve been seeing versions of this since The Great Ziegfeld (1938) and the fact that it’s opened huge means we’ll see it again and again … though the last panel of that Mort Drucker/Dick de Bartolo parody would feature pitches like Gary, ending with ‘Rock N Roll Part 1’ on Top of the Pops or Phil, ending with the release of the Christmas album, or Jimmy, ending with the ratings success of Jim’ll Fix It.
By the way, I’ve a book coming out soon …
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