For some time now, a steady stream of music biopics has been crossing the cinema screen. James Mangold's A Complete Unknown, undoubtedly the most eagerly awaited, recently hit cinemas, offering Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, from the particular angle of the phoenix who died to folk in 1965, only to be reborn to rock. It was preceded in 2024 by the reverent Rasta saga of Bob Marley: One Love by American filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green; the full-length portrait Monsieur Aznavour by French duo Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade; and Better Man by Australian director Michael Gracey, about English singer Robbie Williams, portrayed as a chimpanzee. It recently was followed by Chilean director Pablo Larrain's Maria, a sophisticated shrine to the divine Maria Callas.

These few characterizations are enough to give a glimpse of the fairly wide range now available to a sub-genre that has been on the rise again since the unexpected success of French director Oliver Dahan's La Vie en Rose, about Edith Piaf, in 2007 (5 million spectators in France, $86 million dollars – around €66 million at the time – in worldwide earnings). To put it into words, the spectrum ranges from the mimetic biopic – a star performs the position and career in extenso of a legendary musical figure – to the conceptual biopic, which focuses more on staging the idea that this figure embodies.

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