Of all the major sports, boxing has much the most distinguished filmography. Of course that’s to the Homeric nature of the contest. With the honourable exception of Raging Bull, the best fight films are at least semi-fictionalised, from Rocky to The Fighter.
This is psychohistory: an attempt to heal Alejandro Jodorowsky’s turbulent Forties youth by reimagining it. The 88-year-old director of the acid Western El Topo, which was loved by John Lennon, still plans a sequel to that surreal, midnight movie favourite of hippie New York, so Endless Poetry isn’t necessarily his last act.
Yorkshire-born screenwriter Sally Wainwright has carved a distinguished niche for herself as chronicler of that brooding, beautiful region’s social and familial dramas. After the romance of Last Tango in Halifax and the gritty panorama of Happy Valley, she has settled on perhaps the quintessential troubled Yorkshire family, with awesome bleakness on the side: the Brontës.
The sad, short life of country legend Hank Williams makes for a surpassingly dour biopic in I Saw the Light, which does at least prove that its protean star Tom Hiddleston can do a southern American twang and croon with the best of ‘em. If only the actor weren’t trapped in the feel-bad film of the season.
You may never have heard of Florence Foster Jenkins, although she has definitely earned a certain renown among music-lovers. For all the wrong reasons: the American soprano, who performed at private recitals in the early decades of the last century, before a climactic Carnegie Hall appearance a month before her death in 1944, was famous for the sheer awfulness of her voice.
Errol Flynn’s final affair was with an initially 15-year-old girl 33 years his junior, procured minutes after he spied her walk through the studio gates. “You know who he is?” his man for such matters asks. “The most selfish man in the world” and “a walking penis” are two suggestions made in Richard Glatzer and Wash West’s biopic. “Sure,” Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning) answers instead. “Robin Hood.”
A couple of years ago there was a television documentary about Steve Jobs which wafted much smoke up the sainted iHole. A variety of famous fanboys wept over the curve on the iPhone 3 and simpered at the kleptocratic takeover of the music industry. Never mind that Jobs was reportedly short of redeeming features. A documentary has no obligation to supply drama. A feature film is another story. The makers of Steve Jobs have their work cut out finding something plausibly nice to say about a driven egomaniac who tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s changing the planet.
“A huge lizard in sunglasses” was Robin Askwith’s impression of Pier Paolo Pasolini on first meeting the Italian director.
Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead?
The pop-genius-as-self-destructive-lost-soul biopic is this year’s genre du jour. We’ve already had documentaries on Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, while coming down the pike are dramatised bios of NWA, Hank Williams, Elton John, and, again, Cobain. Now Love & Mercy, a fictionalised life of Brian (Wilson), presents the Beach Boys’ resident composer of gorgeous pop classics like "God Only Knows" as a sort of Californian Amadeus, an otherworldly savant through whom sublime music pours while he tries to escape from the domination of a stern father.