![]() ![]() The most caustic vision of all, though, belongs to Vox Lux, in which Corbet’s depiction of music industry exploitation is almost parodically bleak. In one of the movie’s most harrowing scenes, he drunkenly mocks the supposedly vapid lyrics of her solo hit: “Why’d you come around me with an ass like that?” Her Smell depicts Becky’s inner circle as a coterie of enablers and financially dependent hangers-on, content to endure her bad behavior so long as the trendy alt-rock commodification of it remains their meal ticket. In A Star Is Born, Cooper’s grizzled crooner Jackson Maine all but disowns his new bride Ally for “going pop” and taking the easy sellout route to success. ![]() The animating question of the movie comes from whether or not she’ll sign it and abandon her scrappy but lovable hometown manager, and along with him (we assume, because we’ve seen this movie before) her artistic integrity. In Teen Spirit, a slick music-industry executive (played, with relish, by a scene-stealing Rebecca Hall) offers the professionally naive 17-year-old Violet Valenski a record contract-we all know what that means. Still, each of these movies offers its own critique of the pop-music-industrial complex, and some of them are downright lacerating. For what is pop music if not a direct appeal to escapism, fantasy, and imagination? Perhaps these fictionalized reveries are more fitting. Biopics can often feel staid and predictable-rock biopics doubly so compared to the unruly energy of their source material. Zekiel, who walks around clad in an outfit that is half–Ziggy Stardust, half-“Formation” video. But these four movies about female superstars all eschew the biopic treatment for more imaginative pop-cultural world-building, delighting in the creation of alternative-universe chart toppers like Vox Lux’s glam-butch heartthrob Celeste (Portman plays her with a foul mouth and a thick, Staten Island accent) or, in Her Smell, Amber Heard’s high-fashion grrrl idol Zelda E. These movies all premiered in what, for better or worse, will be at least partially remembered as the Year of Bohemian Rhapsody, when the troubled-yet-Teflon Queen biopic made a mint at the box office and secured Rami Malek a Best Actor Oscar for playing real-life rock god Freddie Mercury. ( Teen Spirit and Her Smell both open this week in limited release.) (Minghella, 33, plays Nick on The Handmaid’s Tale and is the son of the late director Anthony Minghella.) There was also Her Smell, the gritty third collaboration between indie auteur Alex Ross Perry and Elisabeth Moss, who tackles the role of a Courtney Love–esque grunge goddess/drug addict named Becky Something. Also premiering at the 2018 TIFF was Max Minghella’s directorial debut, Teen Spirit, an American Idol–era Cinderella story that cast Elle Fanning as a Polish farm girl who lands a spot on a televised singing competition. If you attended the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, A Star Is Born and Vox Lux weren’t even the only movies you could catch in which a recognizable actress transformed into a fictitious celluloid pop star. ![]() After festival season and ahead of its late-year release, Vox Lux had an award-season simmer Portman even promoted the film on the coveted December issue of Vanity Fair, in a story that described the role as “Portman’s fourth campaign for an Oscar.” The visually striking Vox Lux trailer dropped in late October, smack in the middle of A Star Is Born’s lucrative box office run, and it was all too easy to draw the comparison: “Natalie Portman gives Lady Gaga a run for her money as an extravagant pop star,” went the Oscar-prognostication website Gold Derby’s headline about the teaser. The other was Oscar winner and sometime rapper Natalie Portman, portraying what looked to be a kind of millennial Bowie in another actor turned director’s rock-star flick, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux. The first, of course, was Gaga herself, playing the semiautobiographical role of striving waitress turned pop star Ally in Bradley Cooper’s sweeping remake of A Star Is Born. For a brief, surreal moment early in last year’s Oscar season, it looked as though the Best Actress category could come down to a duel between two different versions of Lady Gaga. ![]()
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