The Best Music Biopic Of All Time Is Completely Inaccurate (And That's Fine)

Every year, Hollywood pumps out at least one or two musician biopics. Last year alone saw the release of "Back to Black," a portrait of the late Amy Winehouse, and the Oscar-nominated "A Complete Unknown," the Bob Dylan origin story as told by James Mangold. It's easy to understand why we keep getting these films: they're pretty popular. Sure, some of them flop, but more often than not, there seems to be an insatiable hunger from the public to watch actors slap on a wig and do an impression of a famous singer. And studios are often all-in because not only are there box office dollars at work, but if filmmakers and actors play their cards right, awards season glory comes calling.

"Bohemian Rhapsody," the 2018 film about Queen singer Freddie Mercury, did boffo box office and scored several nominations, winning Rami Malek a Best Actor trophy, and all of this despite the fact that the film itself is rather lousy. While there's nothing inherently wrong with making a musician biopic, they've become so standard that producers and filmmakers have adopted a rote, rigid formula for pumping them out. This formula is so ingrained into the subgenre that it was brilliantly parodied by Jake Kasdan's hilarious 2007 pic "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," a film that so perfectly takes the piss out of the musician biopic that it probably would've killed the subgenre forever ... if only it hadn't been a flop.

While there are some bright spots here and there — all things considered, "A Complete Unknown" is pretty good — musician biopics often underwhelm, mainly because they're all following that same damn formula: a musician is born, they rise to fame, they meet other famous musicians along the way, they suffer some sort of downfall (usually due to drug addiction), they have a triumphant return that enshrines their legacy for all time. It seems that the best way to break out of this vicious, frequently boring cycle is to ignore it completely, which is probably why the best musician biopic of all time is Miloš Forman's brilliant "Amadeus," a movie that makes the bold decision to both ignore formula and say to hell to historical accuracy.

I'm willing to bet at least a few people reading this have heard, at one point or another, that the death of famed composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came about due to his bitter rivalry with fellow composer Antonio Salieri. But there's absolutely no truth to that at all. If you've heard this at some point in your life, the source is very likely "Amadeus," Forman's 1984 film adapted from the play by Peter Shaffer. Shaffer's play was, in turn, borrowing from a fictional rivalry cooked up by playwright Alexander Pushkin.

Forman's film is loaded with inaccuracies. The real Mozart and Salieri were not rivals, but instead friends. Mozart did die young, but his death had nothing to do with Salieri (there's no clear consensus on what killed Mozart at age 35, but it was likely some sort of fever or infection). On top of all that, Forman's film, with a script by Shaffer, fudges countless details: Mozart operas that were actually huge successes are portrayed as flops, and Salieri, a man who had a wife and several children, is portrayed as celibate (I've seen a few people cheekily refer to Salieri in the film as an "incel," but incels are celibate due to circumstances they believe are beyond their control, whereas the film's Salieri deliberately makes himself celibate in order to devote his entire life to music).

Historians have taken issue with the way "Amadeus" bends the truth ever since it hit the screen, but Forman and Shaffer were always open about the way the film twists the facts. Shaffer even referred to the work as "a fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri." The film also gives itself a clever loophole: the entire story is being told by an elderly, clearly demented Salieri. It's not a historical record; it's the recollections of an delirious old man on the verge of death. Of course there will be inaccuracies. 

Do musician biopics (or biopics in general) have an obligation to be completely accurate? I suppose that depends. Certain true details obviously must be respected: "Bohemian Rhapsody" would be an even worse movie had it erased Freddie Mercury's queerness, and if Taylor Hackford's "Ray" had cast a white man instead of Jamie Foxx to play Ray Charles, there would understandably be hell to pay. But a musician biopic need not stick completely to the facts. In truth, I can't think of a single film in the subgenre that can be considered 100% historically accurate — writers and filmmakers will almost always condense or massage or alter the truth in the name of a compelling narrative, and that's exactly what they should do.

And yet, it seems like in the years since "Amadeus" hit theaters and took home multiple Oscars (it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, and Best Sound), a knee-jerk backlash has risen up whenever the film gets mentioned. "You know, that movie isn't accurate!" people quickly say, as if adding a footnote to the film itself. To that I say: who cares?

Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment recently released "Amadeus" on 4K for the first time in the form of its original theatrical cut (previous home media releases only featured the so-called director's cut, which adds 20 minutes to the film and is considered by most to be inferior). I've seen "Amadeus" countless times before, but watching it in this new 4K release felt almost transcendent. I thought: it must be embarrassing for other movies to know they'll never be as good as this. 

"Amadeus" opens with the ancient Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) trying, and failing, to die by suicide. After this attempt, Salieri is visited by a priest, who listens wrapt as the aging composer tells the sordid tale of how he killed the famous Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce). In Salieri's telling, he grew up idolizing Mozart, a child prodigy who began performing for kings at a young age. Salieri is clearly a gifted musician himself, and he wants nothing more — or so he says — than to create beautiful music as a way of pleasing God.

But as good as Salieri may be, he will never be as good as Mozart. And the horrible thing is that Salieri knows this. He immediately recognizes that Mozart isn't some mere musician, he's someone with a divine gift. To add insult to injury, when the adult Salieri finally meets the adult Mozart, he finds that Mozart is an annoying, horny, childish brat. 

Hucle, who adopts a wonderfully terrible giggle, plays Mozart as a booze-swilling, whiny genius with a preternatural hard-on and a predilection for scataoligical humor. He's the type of person who would easily turn you off if you met him giggling and cavorting at a party. And yet ... Mozart can compose the most beautiful, wonderful music with seemingly no real effort. He's not just talented, or gifted, or skilled — he's borderline supernatural.

Hulce is wonderful here, but "Amadeus" truly belongs to Abraham, who won the Oscar (he and Hulce were both nominated for Best Actor rather than having one of them fit into the Best Supporting Actor category). While Salieri sinks to bitter depths as the film proceeds, Abraham wisely makes the choice to not play him as a downright villain, but rather as a pathetic, longing creature who is aware of his limitations. As Salieri himself says, he wants nothing more than to make wonderful music. And yet he's cursed to forever be mediocre when compared to Mozart. 

Abraham perfectly embodies the jealous yearning of the character. One of the best scenes in the film arises when Salieri pours over some of Mozart's sheet music and is stunned to find both that there are no corrections and that the music itself is heartbreakingly beautiful. "This was a music I'd never heard," Salieri's narration tells us. "Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God." As he hears the music in his mind, Salieri tilts his head upward, tendons straining in his neck, eyes closed in both ecstacy and downright horror, the pages of sheet music dropping violently from his hands as he swoons.

Did any of this happen? Probably not. In fact, no. And yet, it doesn't matter. "Amadeus" is such a brilliant, entertaining film that whether it is fact or fiction ultimately is a pointless argument. All that matters is that the film burns with an intense passion. It's funny, it's sexy, it's scary. It has pretty much everything you can want from a movie (including a musical score to die for). And who among us can't relate to the kind of intense envy that burns within Saleri? We may not know full-blown geniuses in our lives like Mozart, but all of us know at least one person who seems to be sailing by; thriving while we struggle, and scrape, and beg for some sort of blessing from above that will never come. Whether fact or fiction, "Amadeus" truly is filmmaking at its finest. If you want a history lesson, go read a book.