There’s always been this phenomenon in Hollywood, where if a movie becomes a critical, or box-office success, while expanding the industry into new areas, the dead space between where the industry was and where that movie is quickly gets filled with a multitude of coat tail riders. Lately, the new kid on the successful genre block has been music biopics, spanning the grit and gold of Johnny Cash in Walk The Line to the guns and drugs of Get Rich Or Die Tryin’.

The film that may have started the rush was the strangely successful 8 Mile, a story loosely based on the life of rapper Eminem. Fans loved it, critics applauded his acting skills and didn’t pan the movie overall, and suddenly Universal had a surprise hit on their hands. Others quickly picked up the rapper theme and street savvy music makers have been hitting the screen in high profile films like Hustle and Flow, and Get Rich or Die Tryin’.

Other genres of music soon stepped up as well, with country getting some exposure in Walk The Line, Kurt Cobain being raised from the grunge rock dead in Last Days, and culminating in an Oscar winning performance for Jamie Foxx in Ray.

Why do these movies appeal to audiences so much? Aside from the usual obsession with celebrity, James Mangold, who directed Walk The Line, feels that despite plotline similarities, these movies portray

a very common human story. If we could take 500 people at random out of the American heartland tonight, sweep them into a gymnasium and make them kick, cold turkey, whatever substance they’re used to using to fill whatever hole is in their heart — be it cigarettes, drink or the crack no one knows they’re keeping in a drawer — you’ll find a world of torments identical in scale to those of any famous person.

The slew of musical life stories hasn’t ground to a halt yet either, with biopics of Rolling Stones member Brian Jones, folk god Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, James Brown and a host of others are all in the works.

(source)