Michael

As someone who has been watching Bollywood biopics for the last decade, there should be little in Antoine Fuqua’s Michael that should upset me. When the protagonist is not showing off his god-given talent on screen, all that the secondary characters talk about is how special he is. It is a film that mistakes superficial tics like voice, make-up and costume as authenticity. Also, a film that confuses grit for honesty. It’s eerie how much of Fuqua’s biopic on the ‘King of Pop’ seems to internalise and then channel Rajkumar Hirani’s Sanju (2018). Hirani’s biopic on Sanjay Dutt is among the gold standards of Bollywood biopics; the hardest anyone’s worked to vindicate its powerful protagonist. Michael might be Hollywood’s answer to Sanju.

To understand the hysteria that once surrounded the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, one must be from that era. The pop legend’s biopic Michael comes nearly two decades after his passing. The man who had, in the later years, withdrawn himself from the public owing to a spate of controversies, was a conflicting personality. One that would amuse, shock and entertain in equal measure. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, the biopic, which marks the acting debut of the late singer’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in the titular role, presents a very sanitised version of Michael Jackson and his rise to stardom. The film is backed by the late singer’s family and close aides, and perhaps that’s the reason that the film is so one-dimensional in its approach.

It’s telling that one of the producers of Michael is John Branca, an entertainment lawyer and co-executor of the Michael Jackson estate, played in the film by Miles Teller. This feels like a film produced by a lawyer—a soulless document sure, but one that’ll hold up in court. Another producer is Graham King, the man behind Bohemian Rhapsody. That this 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic was directed, for the most part, by Bryan Singer, accused multiple times of sexual assault, had no visible bearing on its box office. And King has good reason to hope that the allegations of child sexual abuse against Michael Jackson won’t dent the success of this new biopic.

There’s a scene in Michael where Jackson, played by his real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson, steps out of his palatial home and into a waiting car, fresh from a confrontation with his controlling father Joseph (Colman Domingo). As the car passes through the gates, thousands of fans are screaming his name. He waves gently, slips on his trademark glasses, and the contrast is complete — the private turmoil invisible to the world outside. It’s one of the film’s most effective moments, capturing in a single image what it means to live a double life at that scale.