The majority of director Antoine Fuqua’s biopic of Michael Jackson, “Michael,” is built from a small set of scenes repeated and slightly reworked to fill out the runtime. Jackson endures abuse or manipulation from his father. Jackson has a conversation in which someone tells him how special or talented he is. Jackson exhibits childlike innocence and/or wonder. Jackson comforts sick children. Jackson has an epiphany that leads to his next great hit. Jackson performs that hit. After the first 20 minutes or so, this cycle essentially becomes the rest of the film. The structure begins to feel almost musical in its looping, rhythmic repetition, cycling through familiar beats with only minor variation. Is it a passable diversion? Sure. Does it justify telling this story as a narrative feature film? Not even a little bit.
“Michael” chronicles the rise of pop megastar Michael Jackson from his breakout as the youngest member of the Jackson 5 to his enormously successful solo career. A young Jackson (Juliano Krue Valdi) and his four brothers live in Gary, Indiana, performing in a pop band under the ruthless command of their father and stage manager Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo). As an adult and solo artist, Jackson (played by Jaafar Jackson, Michael Jackson’s real-life nephew) is fabulously successful and views his music as a means of spreading love, joy and peace in the world. The film follows his career up until a seemingly arbitrary endpoint in 1988, where it abruptly ends with groanworthy on-screen text teasing a possible sequel.
The central — and really, only — tension in “Michael” lies in its hero’s struggle to break free from his father’s control and forge his own path. If you ever forget that, don’t worry. The film will remind you. Repeatedly. In conversation after conversation, Jaafar Jackson’s Michael expresses fear of the family patriarch and is urged by other mentors like his bodyguard, mother and producers to pursue his dream of greatness as a solo artist. The film essentially boils Michael Jackson’s psychology down to a hero’s journey whereby he must build up the courage to face his evil father. It’s more “Star Wars” than reality, with a narrative arc that elides any of the artist’s thornier or more controversial dimensions.
Michael Jackson’s childlike nature is shown uncritically through his obsession with Peter Pan and Neverland, as well as his increasingly elaborate collection of exotic pets, including a snake, a giraffe and his beloved chimpanzee Bubbles — all of which Michael Jackson really kept at his Encino, Calif. home. Fuqua frames these proclivities as the quirks of a pure-hearted soul who’s too innocent for our world, rather than exploring how such affectations might reflect a kind of arrested development or how a life shaped by early fame could have left him out of step with ordinary adulthood. Fuqua frames it as purity instead, smoothing over ambiguity until Michael Jackson becomes less a person than a sanctified figure. In this framing, he might as well be Jesus.
The biopic’s tactical endpoint in the late ’80s allows it to avoid covering its subject’s most sensationalized oddities. While there are brief mentions of his vitiligo and a scene covering his rhinoplasty, the real Michael Jackson’s more dramatic physical transformations — including his progressively lighter skin tone and more extensive facial surgeries — are left out. His insecurities are touched on in passing, but never meaningfully explored, an especially notable omission for someone who has been so extensively psychologized in public discourse and media coverage. More importantly, the film ends before he was first accused of child sexual abuse in 1993, the opening salvo in a longer pattern of allegations and legal proceedings that continues to shape public debate over his legacy.
It’s no surprise that a film starring Michael Jackson’s own nephew and produced with the approval of his estate would omit the accusations against him. Still, “Michael” flattens its protagonist into a wide-eyed do-gooder whose one and only flaw is his fear of his father. This dynamic also serves as the film’s only narrative engine, with little else justifying the flow from one scene to the next. The high production values and excellent music keep things chugging along, but “Michael” lacks any real connective tissue between chronological recreations. There's no insight, no plot and no purpose beyond the brazen lionization of its subject.
This becomes painfully apparent in the film’s bizarre conclusion, which features two drawn-out live performances before fizzling out and cutting to black. There’s an attempt at an emotional climax mid-show, but “Michael” so thoroughly fails to make its scenes feel relevant to one another that it never achieves any sense of cumulative emotional or narrative payoff. Even as a surface-level depiction, the film falls short, failing to remotely develop any of the Jackson siblings or meaningfully explore Michael Jackson’s creative process beyond one promising scene set during the making of “Thriller.” The film manages to feel simultaneously repetitive and unfocused, somehow covering decades of material while conveying remarkably little substance about its subject's inner life or artistic evolution.
There are admittedly some effective moments where Fuqua lets the music do the work, with smoothly edited montages that bring out the magic in Jackson’s discography. Still, these moments do little to alleviate the film’s fatal flaw. “Michael” isn’t bad so much as it’s pointless. Jaafar Jackson does a convincing impression of his uncle, and the concert scenes are suitably big and energetic. But it’s hard to ignore the feeling that the material would have been better served as a documentary or concert film, which could preserve the film’s strengths while cutting down on the clumsy, repetitive biopic clichés. Without any narrative propulsion or an interesting take on its mythos, “Michael” barely justifies its existence, playing less like a movie than an expensive museum exhibit — impressively mounted but ultimately lifeless, offering nothing that couldn’t be found in a greatest hits compilation paired with a Wikipedia page.
