10 of the best and worst music biopics of all time - where will Priscilla rank?

It’s a risky business, making a music biopic. Get it right, and you could win the adoration of an already devoted fanbase, delighted to see their hero faithfully represented on the big screen. Get it wrong, though, and those same viewers will have their pitchforks at the ready.

The latest film to tread that narrow line is Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s latest project, which tells the story of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s relationship, through the eyes of the young woman. The film has split the critics: the Standard gave it two stars, saying, Priscilla “has its moments but it’s hard not to be bored watching a woman with nothing to do”. But other reviewers enjoyed the film, describing it as “absorbing”, “intimate”, “quietly extraordinary” and “gracefully told”.

There’s been a real boom in the genre recently — from Rami Malek’s Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, to Taron Egerton as Elton John in Rocketman — and there’s no sign of the output slowing down any time soon, with the recent biopics about Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston both being met with critical acclaim.

Here, we’ve rounded up some of the most notable music biopics from the past — the great, the good, the bad and the downright ugly, and ranked them from best to worst.

Control (2007)

The brief life story of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis – married at 19, a father and voice of the classic debut album Unknown Pleasures at 22, dead at 23 – is told in exquisitely shot black-and-white by photographer and video director Anton Corbijn. Even the terraces of Macclesfield have a bleak beauty as the backdrop to Sam Riley’s portrayal of the withdrawn frontman, who is wrestling with depression and epilepsy and torn between his childhood sweetheart and a glamorous Belgian journalist. The music scenes are the ones that stick in the memory, however, with Riley nailing Curtis’s transfixing, manic performing style.

Walk the Line (2005)

The story of Johnny Cash avoids the Man in Black’s patchier later career to follow a more traditional biopic trajectory: tragic childhood with a furious father, followed by sudden musical success which is tarnished by drug misuse and a stormy love life. Joaquin Phoenix does a fine job of replicating Cash’s cavernous baritone and intense manner, while her spirited performance as his love interest June Carter won Reese Witherspoon her only Oscar. Their stage duets are the uplifting highlights.

I’m Not There (2007)

Bob Dylan’s cultural legacy is so large that in hindsight maybe it’s obvious that a film would require six different actors to portray different facets of his character. They include Heath Ledger as an actor with marriage troubles, Richard Gere as Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid, Marcus Carl Franklin as a black, train-hopping 11-year-old, and Cate Blanchett as the wild-haired folk musician going electric. Director Todd Haynes, who made his name telling the Karen Carpenter story using Barbie dolls, leads Dylanologists down a fascinating, meandering path.

The Runaways (2010)

The brief career of The Runaways might not have been commercially successful enough to merit a biopic, but as an all-female rock band in the mid-Seventies they were pioneers. Dakota Fanning plays lead singer Cherie Currie, on whose memoir the film is based, with Kristen Stewart being cool as ever as Joan Jett. Michael Shannon is predictably good value too, this time playing their creepy svengali Kim Fowley. The inevitable drugs and egos meant their time together was over too quickly, which means the film doesn’t outstay its welcome either.

24 Hour Party People (2002)

Michael Winterbottom’s eccentric, fourth-wall-breaking film goes for the legend over the truth, and features Joy Division in a very different setting from the subsequent Control. This one spreads its net far wider to cover the fertile period of the Manchester music scene that also brought us New Order, Happy Mondays and the Hacienda nightclub. Steve Coogan is the man in the middle as TV presenter and Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson, an eccentric who looks like the sensible one among some of rock’s wilder characters.

England is Mine (2017)

Can a music biopic ever work without the music itself? The answer, as presented by this unauthorised Morrissey biopic, is almost. Director Mark Gill tries to make do with a lack of Smiths’ hits by swerving much of the band’s history, instead focusing on Mozza’s downtrodden adolescence. Jack Lowden delivers a suitably sullen turn as the would-be frontman, but the film’s dourness was crying out for just a sprinkling of Morrissey-Marr magic. Alas, it never came.

Nina (2016)

Not having the rights to the music is one thing, but having the family of your deceased subject in fierce opposition, and your own star actor later denouncing the project, is another thing entirely. This catastrophic Nina Simone biopic was a cliché-ridden mess, with the lead role taken by Zoe Saldana, an Afro-Latina woman, who wore skin-darkening make-up and facial prosthetics in a bid to better resemble the late singer. The move drew outrage; Saldana later said she should “never have played” the vocalist, while Simone’s estate called the whole thing “gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, nauseating [and] soul-crushing”.

Jersey Boys (2014)

Even if you do have all the rights, and manage to get one of the real-life subjects on board with the making of the film, there’s no guarantee the end product will be any good. This Frankie Valli-backed adaptation of the eponymous hit musical seemed like a nailed-on success, but ended up rather out of tune. Under the direction of Clint Eastwood, and with all that chart-topping source material to work with, the songs somehow lacked the same energy as they did on Broadway. It wasn’t a disaster, but it was undeniably diluted by its tiresome, Goodfellas-lite backstory segments.

CBGB (2013)

Venues don’t come much more mythologised than CBGB, the New York hangout that hosted some of the finest American punk rock and new wave bands, from the Ramones to Patti Smith. The story of the club and its maverick owner, Hilly Kristal, is ripe for an intriguing biopic, then? Correct, but this film ain’t that. It’s a caricatured disaster, funny for all the wrong reasons, and a criminal underuse of the source material. Still, there is the amusing subplot that, with both Alan Rickman and Rupert Grint in the cast, it all feels somewhat like a weird dream Harry Potter might have had after a night on the butterbeer.

The Beach Boys: An American Family (2000)

This TV miniseries aims to chart the early history of the Beach Boys, but its depictions of psychedelic culture are about as stereotyped as if they’d been written by someone who spent the Sixties in a secluded nunnery. Although it delves into the drug-addled misadventures of Brian Wilson — a darkly intriguing journey in the right hands — the whole thing just ends up feeling cartoonishly overblown. Wilson himself was less than impressed (“I thought it stunk!” he said). Add in the copyright-dodging sound-alikes on the soundtrack and the result is a very bad vibration. Much better is the Paul Dano-featuring Love and Mercy (2014), which does Wilson a far greater service.