When we think of the term "biopic," what do we think of? We can cast our minds to films like Richard Attenborough’s Ghandi, or the Princess Diana film Spencer; perhaps we think of the musical biopic à la Bohemian Rhapsody, which told the life story of Freddie Mercury and Queen, or Rocketman, which covers the life and history of Elton John. Maybe something more historical like Braveheart or Lincoln.
But neither Braveheart or Spencer are "true" biopics by definition, because they are re-imaginings of their subjects' lives. Spencer has an epigraph of “a fable based on a true tragedy,” while Braveheart is an infamously fictional account of William Wallace’s fight for freedom against the English. For what defines a "true" biopic, it is important to consider the format. Take Schindler’s List (which is a re-telling of the time that real-life Oskar Schindler saved thousands of Jewish lives) and then a film like The Theory of Everything (a film collating the life of scientist Stephen Hawking), which are of different formats. Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 film is more a historical drama, while James Marsh’s 2014 film is more traditionally constructed, spanning over 30 years of Hawking’s life.
While historical dramas contain the story of real people, usually during an important time in their lives, the biopic genre has one defining feature that turns it from a film described as "based on a true story" and into a biopic: you follow the featured protagonist throughout their lives, with the film acting as an autobiographical depiction of that person's experiences. Since biopics are then defined as autobiographical depictions of a person's life, do the filmmakers behind biopics have a moral obligation to show what really happened within that person’s life, as accurately as possible? If they do, at what point does limiting that creative license then interfere with an artistic vision?
Let’s say that a filmmaker is making a biopic but adaptingfrom a source material. A recent example would be Christopher Nolan with Oppenheimer, which is adapted from the biographical novel American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Nolan has a semblance of narrative freedom to this, but let’s say he chose to present his art as a factual rendition i.e. as a non-fiction documentary. One would argue that he should then be careful to document the story accurately because he is presenting it as truth. But filmmakers who are employing narrative, creating dramatic renditions for entertainment and thematic value, are not required to do so. So with these blurred lines existing between historical dramas and biopics, when a historical drama presents itself biographically — and is sold to audiences as such — there’s a certain point it crosses the threshold into fiction, no longer depicting the real human they are portraying. At that point, the film becomes a revisionist biopic, retelling a life without consideration for the truth.
Over the years, there have been plenty of these revisionist biopics. One example is the 2018 film Green Book, a buddy road trip movie about a real-life Black and gay piano prodigy named Dr. Donald W. Shirley (Mahershala Ali) on a music tour of the racist American south, told from the perspective of the goofy, homophobic racist (Viggo Mortensen) that chauffeurs him around.
The film wasn’t a lot of people’s cup of tea (I feel you, Spike Lee), and its awarding of Best Picture at the Academy Awards caused a lot of controversy, namely for rewarding a film that reframed a black man’s story through the eyes of his white, racist chauffeur. The film upset the family of Dr. Shirley so much that they condemned the film, calling it a “symphony of lies.” Their reaction then caused Mahershala Ali — who won Best Supporting Actor for his role — to apologize. The film is constructed to be anti-racist, with the plot focused on the character growth of the white man within the story as he grows from a racist homophobe into a more considerate human. One could argue that Green Book’s director, Peter Farrelly, has every right to reinterpret Dr Shirley’s life in the pursuit of art. In the case of Green Book, its naivety around the issues of race, especially in its removal of Dr. Shirley’s autonomy, trumps its good intentions with the film's anti-racist message coming across as just plain racist.
So we have an artistic vision from Peter Farrelly here that succeeds in the most part — you really have to accept this as fact or never trust that the academy knows a damn thing — as a piece of entertainment, but also exists to revise what is truthful about Shirley’s life in quite heinous fashion. Is this then what could be construed as an unethical biopic? If so, under what framework is a biopic that revises history considered unethical and is then treated as such?
An answer may be found on the Venice lido in September 2022, where Netflix first released the now infamous Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde.
Andrew Dominik’s miserabilist take on Monroe’s life caused audiences and critics alike to be repulsed by it, with Rotten Tomatoes (as of June 2026) having it at 42% critical and 36% audience score. It was named in several worst of 2022 lists, with conversation on the film predominantly and myopically focused on it being exploitative. By using the image and life of Monroe in bastardized ways, sacrilegiously depicting her as a victim of assault with little truth attached, the film became as cancelled a film as possible. Having been a prestige biopic released in the Oscar corridor and premiering at Venice Film Festival, the world’s longest-running film festival, it was fully expected to be contending in the Academy Awards in 2023.
You may be nodding in excited agreement, that those "damn critics" finally got it right. But why did Blonde get a different treatment than every other revisionist biopic out there? Green Book was the very racist it aspired to discuss and was awarded the academy’s highest honor; The Greatest Showman glazed over the truth of P.T. Barnum’s crimes in favor of a bop-infused musical that had universal popularity; but Blonde, a film that uses the iconography of Marilyn Monroe as a surrogate for women everywhere to brutally showcase the abuse that is experienced by women in Hollywood, gets vilified. Especially when Blonde refers to itself as a fictionalized reimagining of Monroe’s life in its synopsis, with the film being adapted from a book by Joyce Carol Oates, instead of Monroe’s life. Is it hated because it’s so alienating, so angry and miserable? Does Monroe’s icon status protect her from the creative liberties of an artistic vision? Does an artistic vision then have to correlate politically, be morally obligated to the memory of the person it’s envisioning?
If we take a look at Best Picture winning Amadeus, which is itself a pseudo biopic of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, we’ll see that it exists in the same subgenre as Blonde: historical fiction. Amadeus was notoriously false — portraying Mozart as a petulant child — to the extent that when the film was parodied by The Simpsons episode "Margical History Tour," they made a concerted note for Lisa Simpson to mention how it was fiction within the confines of the episode.
Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022), an excellent under-seen film, takes several creative historical liberties, not the least portraying the 1800’s Empress Sisi as being serenaded by "As Tears Go By"’" by the Rolling Stones, as mentioned in Bill Goodykoontz’s Yahoo review, which also ponders the question “who cares [that Corsage isn’t historically accurate]?” Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood revised the history of a real person in Sharon Tate, reinventing her tragic demise as a happily-ever-after. Its title invokes the premise of fairy tale, so is that fine? Damien Chazelle’s Babylon imagines the origin story of Singin’ in the Rain through a shimmering spectacle of decadent hysteria, drugs, and elephant feces.
Babylon is speaking on old Hollywood’s pretension and misogyny in a different way. It’s more palatable to audiences by being comedic and by not containing real life figures, of which it could easily have done. If Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy had been Marilyn Monroe — LaRoy in Babylon is also a self-destructive blonde bombshell used by men in Hollywood — would it have received the same vitriolic response as Blonde? Does Vicky Krieps’ Empress Sisi being such a sarcastic, fun and caustic screen presence make the reimagining of her history fine?
If movies and art should sanitise themselves out of respect for their subjects, we lose a small, vital part of what makes certain art so powerful. If we are to condemn biopics solely on the basis of depiction, where then will challenging art exist? Endorsement of assault, sexual abuse and many other horrible acts that human beings have committed throughout the centuries of our existence is not done through depiction alone.
Take William Blake’s "A Negro Hung Alive by The Ribs to a Gallows." It is a painting that depicts a Black man being hung by his ribs. The image of the anonymous man hanging there limply disturbs and repulses, but that’s also its point. It is showcasing cruelty, its depiction fundamentally against what it’s showing. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), often labelled as the "sickest film of all time,” contains a strong anti-fascist statement through the various nauseating methods of abuse. It is a film which has now been heralded as a masterpiece by revered critics. It is designed to shock, itself inspired by real events that may or may not have occurred the way Pasolini depicts.
One of the most renowned paintings in the world is Francisco Goya’s "Saturn Devouring His Son" which bases itself on the myth of Kronos/Saturn fearing his son Zeus/Jupiter would overthrow him. A terrifying piece of art that embodies the anxiety of child rearing. This piece of Goya’s art helped challenge the romanticism of mid-1800’s art, himself being one of the first modernist painters. Another piece of his, named "The Disasters Of War," shows the men of a war being brutally murdered, decapitated and quartered; a commentary on the horrors of the conflict between Spain and the French Empire. Does, then, the combination of showcasing the horrors that women face through the real icon that is Monroe make Blonde bad art?
This all boils down to authorship. Does Andrew Dominik, or anyone, have the right to re-author a real life? And if you’re going to reimagine a life, must you respect that person and potentially diminish artistic vision? There is no specific line that exists between what is morally correct and ethically right because of our own subjectivity but could that line then exist within the subject of a biopic's autonomy? The glorious hoot that is the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man cited the pop star as a writer and producer. In the film, Williams is portrayed by a CGI monkey, taking the “performing monkey” metaphor that Williams would often state in literal fashion. If Better Man would have been created without input from the former Take That star, would that decision be morally wrong?
Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is an instance where the conundrum of authorship finds a whole new perspective.
His pseudo-biopic of himself takes the creative liberties that he is "allowed" to as a filmmaker enacting his own creative vision about his own life. Does this make The Fabelmans a morally ethical biopic? In the film, he changes history, replacing big chunks of his life for saccharine inventions such as a girlfriend that none of his remaining peers say he had. His film speaks about his own familial drama, explaining how the divorce his parents went through bled into the stories he created during his long illustrious career. It feels potentially the only moral route for re-writing a life, but is this only okay because he is exploiting his own trauma for art purposes rather than someone else’s? Where, then, does the currently untitled Tom Holland-starring, Fred Astaire biopic stand in this argument on rights and authorship? The late Astaire reportedly included a clause in his will requesting that nobody portray him on screen. He is quoted as saying “It is there because I have no particular desire to have my life misinterpreted, which it would be,”.
So it begets back to the "rights" problem. Does Spielberg have the right to "falsify" his history through art? Does Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs have the right to use the image of Apple’s founder in a fabricated biopic, inventing a plot around real events in history. Can David Fincher reinterpret reality for The Social Network, fabricate entire subplots for entertainment value? Does Smart Energy GB have the right to use Albert Einstein’s image to sell energy? On a legal basis, yes. In 2018, the legal rights to the image of deceased celebrities such as Albert Einstein were sold to advertisers.
Morally, I don’t think there is a true answer. It’s rooted in subjectivity, our interpretation on the concept of using a real person’s image is based on our interpretation of the art. Someone may watch the Fred Astaire biopic and be moved and changed as a person by the art they witness. In an ideal world, Blonde would have its cake and eat it by being respectful about the horrors Monroe may have faced, and that so many women in Hollywood continue to. But if a loud, crude film that speaks on the disrespect women face was respectful, might that not have trivialised the point of the art in hand? Would it not have suppressed the more disturbing and evocative elements of the film?
But even if it had been possible, should we ever be attempting to suppress art — unless actual harm occurs to the actors or crew in the name of said art — that skews a negative light on its highly regarded subjects even at the cost of historical accuracy? In this age of misinformation, there’s a strong argument to be made about falsifying history in the name of commentary but in the annals of history, art has always imitated life. From fictional gods wielding power to real victims without any, the nightmarish art that depicts the struggles of a section of society is designed to be difficult. We shouldn’t and mustn’t curb discussions over the moral indignities that art depicts, whether using a real person in a biopic or a fictional character. Society will never be able to stop the intellectual free fall that occurs when art is maligned for its negative emotional evocation.
Then if art should not be censored, the argument that biopics have an obligation to be factual collapses. Therein lies a truth: it’s the artist's decision on how accurate their work is to the true story. The creator of the art (under the framework of auteur theory) has narrative control, and can do what they feel is necessary for their art. Therefore we can argue that every biopic is ultimately a falsehood as the creation of art about a real life person can only ever be constructed. They can recreate but every decision is lensed through the creator's intent and regardless of how accurate a decision may be, there is an exposure to subjectivity through the filmmaking process itself. So while our response to biopics are entirely subjective to the individual receiving them, every biopic can only ever be morally unethical — and that is okay. Such is and should be the freedom of art.
