Best movies about musicians

(Image credit: Alamy)

There are biopics—and then, there are musicianbiopics. Based on the sheer amount of biographical films about real artists, it's basically a subgenre; we just can't get enough of seeing our favorite actors transform into our favorite artists and learning the stories behind the music. (Seriously, in the past year alone, we've gotten biopics on Bob Marley and Amy Winehouse, with the Timothée Chalamet-led Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown still to come, and the Michael Jackson film Michael is due out next year.)

Not all are great—see the satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story for how cliched they can be—but many have led to some of the most transformative performances. The best musician biopics not only celebrate rock, pop, hip-hop, and R&B legends' work but reveal what led to their rise, insight into their interior world, and, at times, their inevitable fall.

While some serve as a visual representation of an artist’s musical catalog, à la Rocketman or I’m Not There, others, like Prince’s Purple Rain or Bette Midler’s The Rose, can be the catalyst for an artist’s next big hit. (How sad would the world be without the 8-Mile-spawned “Lose Yourself” to make us lose our damn minds every time we hear those opening guitar notes?) And, since musical biopics require some of the highest skills an actor can possess—they do have some musical talent of their own, or at the very least, be able to seamlessly fake it—the level of talent seen in these pictures is often top notch. Oscar-worthy, even!

Below, find the very best musician biopics of all time, ranging from old-school picks to recent hits and how to watch them.

'8 Mile' (2022)

Taking a page out of Prince’s book, Eminem unexpectedly took a starring role in the semi-autobiographical flick 8 Mile, which examines the rapper’s origins as a struggling blue-collar worker ahead of his time in the spotlight. Like Purple Rain, 8 Mile took plenty of liberties with Eminem's storyline: The singer was a cook before being discovered by Dr. Dre, not a factory worker, and his character B-Rabbit’s relationship with Alex (Brittany Murphy) was purely fictional. And much like Purple Rain, while the resulting film was decent enough, earning it two thumbs up from Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper (among other critics), this one was all about the music. Its pièce de résistance, “Lose Yourself,” which begins to play after B-Rabbit wins all three rounds of an epic rap battle against his rival Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie), not only won an Oscar, it became one of his most streamed songs ever, racking up more than 2.3 million spins on Spotify alone.

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'Back to Black' (2024)

Back to Black was a controversial film right out of the gate: The trailer alone had fans divided, with some calling for the singer, who died of alcohol poisoning in 2011, to be left in peace, and others excited to see her get her due on the big screen. The Amy Winehouse estate was on board, however, and gave the film and its star, Marisa Abela, their stamp of approval. No matter which camp you fall into, you can’t deny that the hair, makeup, and vocals behind this one are on point—especially considering that Abela had never sung a note before joining the film. “I think if I stopped to really let fear in, it would have become overwhelming,” she later told ABC. “It was only sort of once we finished filming, and I started talking to people about it, that I realized I'd sort of done kind of a mad thing taking this on." We’ll say!

Nicole Briese is an editor and writer based in Florida. You can catch her musings on life, style and all thing shopping over on her blog, Nicolebjean. Find more of her work on PEOPLE, USA TODAY, Brides, Us Weekly, Refinery 29, Woman's World, Brit + Co, and more.