"hen Walk the Line strode into cinemas in 2005, all dressed in black, it gave final shape to a template that Hollywood has been copying ever since. James Mangold's Oscar-winning Johnny Cash film - following on the heels of Ray, Taylor Hackford's similarly awards-garlanded take on Ray Charles a year earlier - established the music biopic blueprint so definitively that the form immediately ossified into cliché."
"Except for one thing: they've only managed to rope in "21-time Oscar nominee and three-time winner" Meryl Streep! In 2004, paying tribute to Streep, Nora Ephron - whom the actor had essentially portrayed in the from-life marriage-breakdown drama Heartburn - observed that she "plays all of us better than we play ourselves". Streep has received two Oscar nods for playing musicians - the violinist Roberta Guaspari in Music of the Heart, and the tone-deaf socialite in Florence Foster Jenkins."
Walk the Line and Ray established a definitive music-biopic template of troubled childhood, meteoric ascent, addiction, and redemptive finale, which quickly calcified into cliché. Subsequent films such as Walk Hard, Bohemian Rhapsody, and recent Dylan and Springsteen biopics have left the genre saturated and formulaic. Cameron Crowe's Joni Mitchell film breaks that dreary pattern through the casting of Meryl Streep. Streep's prior musician roles and reputation for inhabiting unconventional artists suit Mitchell's cerebral, analytical approach to songwriting. Mitchell's work combines intellectual rigor with an absence of sentimentality, requiring a sensitive, nuanced performance to capture its architecture and emotional restraint.
Read at The Independent
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