When the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown hit theaters in 2024, critics were quick to jump on its historical inaccuracies. Dylan, they noted, did not meet folk music legend Woody Guthrie in a psychiatric hospital, nor did he ever date a woman named Sylvie Russo. The list of ways in which the movie had subverted the historical record was long, forcing director James Mangold to spring to his film’s defense—claiming he had always set out to make a “fable,” not a documentary. 

As director Martin Scorsese once put it, “cinema is emotional truth, not factual truth.” But the idea that veracity must be sacrificed on the altar of entertainment would be far more acceptable if these biopics were actually worth watching. Recent additions to the genre generally amount to little more than toothless hagiographies (think Elvis or Bohemian Rhapsody) or reductive tales of tragic heroines (think Marilyn Monroe in Blonde and Judy Garland in Judy); and rarely do filmmakers acknowledge accountability for the way in which their work will inevitably shape popular conceptions of history.

With the film industry today relying almost entirely on reworking familiar stories to get audiences into movie theaters, executives are more keen than ever to give celebrity lives’ cinematic treatment. Elon Musk, Michael Jackson and Madonna biopics are all in the pipeline—not to mention the four upcoming films about the lives of each individual Beatle. If Hollywood is going to insist on churning out these cine-portraits, directors would do well to think long and hard about what their film can do that a documentary never could. Which complex emotional truths can it reveal? What can they tell us about the true nature of genius? 

Some filmmakers have attempted to achieve this by leaning into the impossibility of ever reaching full historical accuracy. Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette, shows the queen running around Versailles in Converse sneakers and tracks her rise and fall with music from the likes of Aphex Twin and the Strokes. A year after the film’s release, Todd Haynes took Coppola’s experimental approach a step further with I’m Not There—enlisting six actors (including Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale) to portray different facets of Bob Dylan’s identity.