Why I Love Music Biopics

Sometimes students ask me what my favorite movie of all time is. I don’t have one, but I do have a genre. I love music biopics. I always feel a little ashamed admitting that, because I assume they expect me to say films like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the Harry Potter series, or maybe even a Tim Burton movie because I’m a visual artist.

I was asked this question just yesterday, and later that evening I found myself alone on a Friday night, searching for something to watch. I landed on the Bob Dylan biopic and was happy to find it and add it to my list. These films stir something deep in me. Ray Charles. Johnny Cash. Elton John. Whitney Houston. Freddie Mercury. Bob Dylan. Even fictional characters like Ally in A Star Is Born (2018) or Daisy in Daisy Jones & the Six.

What is it that makes these stories so compelling? I enjoy the nostalgia, the rags-to-riches narratives and the glimpses into the lives of incredibly talented artists. But I think it’s deeper than that.

I think what moves me is not just the music, but what it costs them. The sacrifice. The refusal to be shaped by expectation. The courage to be seen despite fear. The way their art both saves them - and almost destroys them.

Watching them, I’m reminded of how much I want to live with that same courage, honesty, and devotion to what feels true.

In A Complete Unknown, when a young Bob Dylan travels to visit a sick Woody Guthrie, he says, “I want to meet Woody. Maybe catch a spark.” That line stayed with me. I realized that’s what I’m doing, figuratively, when I watch these films, standing close to someone else’s creative fire, hoping it might remind me of my own. It feels similar to the way I find myself tending small corners of my life lately - making space for what matters, even when everything else feels heavy.

There is something sacred about creativity. The way God shares this gift with us, the way it connects us to meaning, to each other, to ourselves. Especially in midlife seasons when energy shifts and certainty fades, creativity, for me, has become less about proving anything and more about staying alive, awake, and tethered to wonder. The awe of it never really leaves. Sometimes it just waits quietly for us to come back. And lately, tending that spark feels like a form of care.

This week, my daughter was excited to tell me she’d bought me a shirt at Goodwill, a Janis Joplin T-shirt. She knows me. Janis’s song “Me and Bobby McGee” will forever take me back to 1995, my junior year of high school, listening to it on repeat in my 1986 blue Ford Bronco. And yes, Hollywood, I’m still waiting for her biopic.