Warning: with Back to Black and four Beatles movies, Hollywood’s most cliched genre isn’t going away | Zach Schonfeld

With each passing year, it becomes harder to deny that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Jake Kasdan’s 2007 cult comedy about a fictitious rocker’s rise and drug-addled fall, might be the most prescient Hollywood film of the 21st century.

Its hero, Dewey (John C Reilly) blames himself for his brother’s death, ascends to fame, falls for a singer who isn’t his wife, rubs shoulders with the Beatles, descends into drugs, goes to rehab, gets clean, and – by the film’s end – makes a triumphant return to the stage.

With the exception of Maestro(which, despite its flaws, surely reflects Bradley Cooper’s vision and artistry), these movies feel less like auteur-driven cinema than estate-sanctioned exercises in brand management, with their easy, IP-adjacent appeal juiced by access to renowned songbooks.

Photograph: Columbia Pictures/AllstarThat one-two punch ushered in the new age of rock biopics, and set the template for Walk Hard to skewer: young rocker rises from poverty, becomes a sensation, falls into drugs and temptation.

Bohemian Rhapsody squandered an impressive Rami Malek performance by egregiously rearranging the facts of Freddie Mercury’s life (no, he wasn’t diagnosed with HIV before Live Aid).

They’re fictitious character studies, like the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a mordant, richly detailed portrait of a 1960s folksinger struggling to make it, or Tár, Todd Field’s hypnotic examination of a world-renowned conductor’s unravelling.Like Walk Hard, these films crackle with verve and imagination, depict actual milieux, and make their titular heroes seem as real as Dylan or Leonard Bernstein.