“Michael” slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great.
Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted.
“Michael” doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts. It moonwalks right past them. The result is a kind of fantasy film, one that relives the extraordinary highs of Michael Jackson while turning a blind eye to the lows.
There’s something understandably hard to resist about that. Who wouldn’t love to forget all the bad that comes with Michael Jackson? “Billie Jean,” alone, is good enough to give you amnesia. We’re talking about one of the greatest song-and-dance entertainers of the 20th century. The connection he forged with millions shouldn’t be taken for granted. And it can feel downright giddy to once again bask in Jackson’s former glory — or, at least, an uncanny approximation of it by Jaafar Jackson, his nephew. But that also makes “Michael” as much a fairy tale as Peter Pan’s Neverland.
“Michael” originally included scenes dealing with the sexual abuse allegations, but those were cut due to stipulations in an earlier settlement. The finished film, scripted by John Logan (“Gladiator,” “Aviator”), is largely structured as a father-son drama. In the film’s early Gary, Indiana-set scenes, Joe Jackson (a typically compelling Colman Domingo) forcefully drills his children into becoming the Jackson 5 and whips young Michael (an excellent Juliano Krue Valdi) with his belt.
While “Michael” spans the Jackson 5 and “Off the Wall” and “Thriller,” its through line is Michael’s struggle for emancipation from his overbearing father and manager. In that way, it’s quite similar to 2022’s “Elvis,” which likewise turned on the dynamic between Presley and the controlling Colonel Tom Parker.
Similarly, the broad-strokes, play-the-hits biopic approach is very much at work in “Michael,” produced by Graham King (“Bohemian Rhapsody”). Fuqua, best known for muscular thrillers like “Training Day” and “The Equalizer,” is maybe an unlikely pick for the task. But he cleverly stages some scenes, like when young Michael first lays down a track in a recording studio. While his father looms outside and producers tell Michael not to shuffle his feet so much, Fuqua moves inside the booth. We hear nothing but Michael’s voice. The noise stops and there’s just his pure, not-yet-corrupted vocal power, singing “Who’s Lovin’ You.”
What happened to Jackson as he became an adult, many would consider both an astonishing success story and an American tragedy. “Michael” doesn’t try for that balance. It mainly follows the emergence of an icon, albeit a peculiar one who takes shelter in a room full of children’s toys and whose need to be “perfect” drives him to cosmetic surgery in his early 20s. These and other developments (like the arrival of Bubbles the chimp) are mostly met with eye rolls by family members: the idiosyncrasies of a man-child genius.
At nearly every turn, you can feel the narrative being twisted, sometimes by those still alive. (Joe Jackson died in 2018, nine years after his son’s death at 50.) Katherine Jackson (Nia Long), Michael’s mother, is downright saintly. John Branca (Miles Teller), co-executor of Jackson’s estate and a producer of the film, is seen as a heroic ally to Michael.
Branca, perhaps, deserves the victory lap. Such a big-screen revival for Jackson was once unthinkable. But “Michael” is the latest in a string of successes for the former King of Pop, including Cirque du Soleil shows and “MJ the Musical” on Broadway — all despite the evidence presented by the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland.” “Michael” isn’t really a rebuttal to that film. It’s pure pop shock-and-awe. And turning up the volume on “Beat It” will win you some arguments.
What’s on screen is constantly running, in our minds, alongside what isn’t. Even the glossiest of biopics allow some negative characteristics to show, but Fuqua’s film sticks almost entirely to Michael, the myth. He visits kids in hospitals, makes Black history on MTV, writes the “Thriller” album in near solitude. (Kendrick Sampson plays a seldom-seen Quincy Jones.)
As played by Jaafar Jackson, Michael is a wide-eyed innocent who bore the scars of abuse and yet nevertheless maintained a childlike belief in music: king and casualty of pop, at once. If there’s one thing that needs no embellishment here, it’s the fervor of audiences for Jackson at his astonishing peak. Fuqua lingers on the fans losing their minds for Michael, but that ardor was real. Jaafar Jackson’s performance is a remarkable, charming facsimile not just for the dance moves and singing voice but, more crucially, for channeling Jackson’s sweetness.
“Michael” concludes on an oddly and — considering where things would ultimately go for Jackson — completely false note of triumph. But when the movie sticks to the music, as it often does in copious concert performances, it’s hard not to be moved. There is an undeniable thrill in being transported back to a more innocent America awakening to the power of pop spectacle, when arenas sang in unison to “Man in the Mirror” and “Human Nature.” The nostalgia of “Michael” is for more than Michael Jackson. But blindly believing only in that celebrity, in that fantasy, is repeating a sad history all over again.
“Michael,” a Lionsgate release in theaters Thursday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some thematic material, language, and smoking. Running time: 127 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
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This story has been updated to correct the name of Colonel Tom Parker.
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