When N.W.A. glitched the mainstream radio system with their 1988 breakout album Straight Outta Compton, the five upstarts in black—Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella—branded their fresh, documentary-style take on hip-hop as “reality rap.” They took the country on a sonic tour through Compton, and while the group found mega success, wider audiences weren’t comfortable associating the grisly street stories they heard on the record with their own “reality.” They couldn’t stomach that. Hence, “reality rap” never caught on; the more ostracizing term “gangsta rap” sat better with the mainstream media, as it allowed white audiences to keep “gangstas” like N.W.A. at arms length.

F. Gary Gray reintroduces us to N.W.A. on an intimate level with his music-fueled biopic Straight Outta Compton, chronicling the group’s rise to prominence, their eventual split, and the death of ringleader Eazy-E. Full of good performances by actors who each bear an eye-popping resemblance to their real-life counterparts, the movie works—most of the time. Gray and screenwriters Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff at times feel too handcuffed to the group’s well-documented history, breaking up the rhythm of the story to check off a minor, well-documented detail of the journey, no matter how emotionally irrelevant it may be. As a result, the film lacks the same unbridled artistic vitality and brashness its subjects wore on their chests as they roared “Fuck Tha Police” in front of crowds of thousands.

Prioritizing narrative flow and historical accuracy is a challenge that comes with every biopic, but Gray had added pressure; two of the film’s producers are Dr. Dre and Ice Cube themselves. Their involvement is a blessing in that the movie’s first half, focusing on the group’s humble beginnings in Compton, feels alive and authentic. It starts with a young Ice Cube (played by his doppelganger son O’Shea Jackson) and Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins, another dead-ringer) dropping hard beats and rhymes on a small club crowd who’d never heard anything realer. Determined to unleash their musical vision on a larger audience (larger than their local club, anyway), they convince drug dealer Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) to finance their dreams. They start up an indie record label called Ruthless Records and hop in the studio, cutting the landmark record the movie’s named after.

Watching the creation of the group’s classic records come to life on-screen is an unfettered joy as a fan. An early scene sees Eazy hop his “non-rapping ass” into the booth as he struggles to find the beat on the Cube-penned “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” squealing the lyrics until Dre cuts him off from the other side of the glass, laughing. After a quick, playful trash-talk exchange, Dre offers some pointed advice, pleading with Eazy to relax and spit the lyrics like he means it, as if he was literally cruisin’ down the street in his ’64. The camaraderie between the actors feels genuine as they jam out in the studio, and there’s not much more you could want than that. Aldis Hodge and Neil Brown Jr. play MC Ren and DJ Yella, respectively, but they’re essentially non-entities in the story. It’s tough to say, but it feels like their C-character status in the film is informed by the public’s perception of the group rather than their value as human beings in the five-way friendship.

When the group hits the stage to perform their protest anthems in front of sold-out arenas, the movie flirts with greatness. A reenactment of the group’s performance of “Fuck Tha Police” at Joe Louis arena in Detroit brings the house down. Before they can finish the song, Detroit police storm the stage and shove the rappers into a van in handcuffs. It’s an exhilarating scene and a poignant one, once it dawns on you that the level of police harassment and brutality hasn’t diminished a bit since N.W.A. lit a fire under the country’s ass back in the early ’90s.

The movie starts to stumble in its second half, in which the rappers’ tight bond starts to crumble under the weight of contract negotiations and management disputes. These showbiz maneuverings were, in fact, what led to the group’s split (and their infamous volley of dis tracks), but in detailing these dealings the film loses a lot of the electricity it generates in the first act. Fan service moments like Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg conceiving “Nuthin But a G Thang” and 2Pac nodding his head to the piano-driven “California Love” beat for the first time are amusing and full of nostalgia, but they stick out like sore thumbs and interfere with the larger emotional arc.

Eazy-E emerges as the film’s most layered character, with most of the story’s drama emanating from his mentor-student (master-slave?) relationship with the group’s longtime manager, Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), the first big supporter of the group who went on to reveal his true stripes as a cunning manipulator (“You’re smarter than this, Eazy!” he repeats) and shameless scam artist (“That’s how business works!”). Mitchell has the most challenging role of all, as our allegiance to Eazy shifts and sways several times throughout the movie. Eazy made some terrible mistakes and had a rabid ego, but was also a visionary and a symbol of strength, especially when he faced death at the hands of AIDS in 1995. Mitchell captures all of the colors of Eazy’s legacy, and there isn’t much more you could ask of him than that.

It’s freaky how much Jackson looks like his dad. Ice Cube is arguably the most lovable/toughest rapper of all time, and Jackson nails that dichotomy with that signature furrowed brow and big, toothy grin. Hawkins nails Dre’s whole “silent rage” thing, but the writers fail him in that they don’t explore the beauty of Dre’s musical thought process, something that’s earned the headphone mogul a reputation as being one of the most gifted music producers in history. With Dre’s deep involvement in the movie’s production, one would hope for a more penetrating insight into the way his mind works, artistically.

Influential and widely revered as they were, the N.W.A. crew weren’t exactly beacons of morality back then, and Gray mostly doesn’t shy away from that fact. Misogyny and violence were significant pieces of the group’s identity, but the movie is selective in its reflection of these less flattering characteristics. The women in the film are universally objectified, with bare, gyrating female bodies populating the screen on the regular. The party scenes look like booty-tastic ’90s rap videos, and rightfully so; this is an example of Gray staying true to the times and the mentality of the group. Like it or not, this is what the hip-hop scene looked like back then. There’s no mention of Dre’s history of violence against women, however, which, unfortunately, makes the story feel less complete.

In a 2011 CBC Radio interview, Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson was asked why the sun was such a central theme in his famous pocket symphonies. His answer: “Because it’s California sunshine, you know?” (He then proceeded to sing an impromptu, acapella version of “Do It Again.”) It was a delightfully straightforward, almost childlike answer given by a man who wrote heavenly songs to bat away the demons that terrorized and ravaged him in his waking life.

Love & Mercy, an unconventional biopic based on Wilson, isn’t so much about sunshine as it is about his demons. The focus is the anguish and isolation that plagued him from his early days as a musical prodigy and deep into his adult years, when drugs and anxiety nearly reduced his mind to mush. It may be the best musician portrait of the millennium so far, for its artistic ambition, supreme sound design and chilling performances.

It’s a hard enough thing telling someone’s life story in two measly hours, but when your subject is Wilson, a man whose life is so legendary it could easily fill a 1,000-page book, the Wikipedia biopic approach simply won’t cut it. Bad biopics try to shove a life story into a bottle; good ones take on a life of their own. Director Bill Pohlad and screenwriter Oren Moverman get it: instead of going with the “rock ‘n’ roll rise ‘n’ fall” approach, they use two critical, defining slices of Wilson’s life to render a beautifully complex, abstract interpretation of the man who gifted us “Good Vibrations” and “California Girls.” Despite covering only two portions of Wilson’s life, Pohlad and Moverman’s film feels rounded, complete, and faithful to its subject’s soul and spirit.

The narrative is stereophonic, in a way. It tells two stories, phasing them into a larger arc with clever scene arrangement and seamless editing that echoes the fluidity of Boyhood‘s invisible time jumps. Paul Dano plays a young Brian in the ’60s, whose artistic awakening has coincided with the emergence of a debilitating anxiety disorder; John Cusack plays him in the ’80s, a chemically imbalanced mess who’s unsure of every word that escapes his lips.

’80s Brian is a man on a leash, held captive by Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a shady therapist who’s taken charge of Brian’s life and, conveniently, his funds. (Landy’s moved into Brian’s Malibu mansion, moving Brian to a smaller house up the coast.) Brian meets his savior and future wife in Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a savvy car saleswoman who he asks on a date while sitting in a car she’s in the process of selling him. Melinda and Brian’s romance and camaraderie and her efforts to liberate him from the imperious Dr. Landy drive their half of the film.

The earlier time frame covers the Beach Boys in their prime, topping the charts and competing for pop culture dominance with The Beatles. An early scene has the camera slowly circling Dano’s Brian, sitting at a piano and playing a kernel of a song that, as the movie progresses, turns into “God Only Knows,” which would become widely regarded as one of the best songs ever written. His gift comes with a curse: severe panic attacks begin to wreak havoc on his psyche, torturing him as he creates Pet Sounds, an album that would become his preeminent masterpiece.

Wilson led a turbulent life from the start, going from being the son of an emotionally and physically abusive father and straight into the arms of Dr. Landy. He didn’t live life on his terms, instead resigning himself to the role of peon for most of his adult life. The only time he had absolute control was in the studio, where he was notoriously meticulous about the execution of his musical arrangements. Pohlad recreates the famous Pet Sounds sessions in brilliant detail, in the same studio where Wilson and The Wrecking Crew laid down the classic record. Dano gets Wilson’s obsessive perfectionism down, well, perfectly, vocalizing to the musicians exactly how he wants each note played. He yells to the cello player from the booth: “Taka-ta-taka-ta-taka-ta-taka!”

Love & Mercy glides forward gracefully, flitting from side to side between the two time periods like a well handled hockey puck. Its shape doesn’t resemble any biopic I’ve ever seen, and that’s its strongest quality. It jumps forwards and backwards in time, but the story’s movement feels lateral, not linear. The way Pohlad accomplishes this is by letting the two stories breathe and develop on their own terms and on their own time, apart from each other. They’re weaved together with sharp filmmaking technique, but beyond that they’re completely discrete.

The most glaring proof of this is the fact that Dano and Cusack look nothing alike. Their interpretations of Wilson are unique, and there doesn’t seem to be any sense of continuity between their performances. This is a good thing. If they’d used makeup to make them look more alike, it would have soured the pot from the get-go.

Looper comes to mind: What sold Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a younger Bruce Willis wasn’t the creepy-looking makeup; it was his performance. It was the twitches, the way he spoke, the way he walked, the way he held his hands, the way he raised his eyebrow. Cusack looks nothing like Dano or Wilson, but when he’s in motion—dangling his arms at his sides, whispering like a child with a secret—he sounds and moves and feels just like Wilson. He had a steeper hill to climb than Dano (who’s a dead-ringer for a young Wilson in every way), but he makes it to the other side without the aid of prosthetics or CG tomfoolery. Impressive.

This is the most subtle, measured performance of Dano’s career. He’s always been a standout, but always seems to be aggressively trying to steal scenes in an almost competitive, selfish manner that occasionally undermines his on-screen partners (he does this in Looper to Gordon-Levitt, actually). The fact that he’s playing such an iconic man (who happens to still be alive) in this movie seems to have calmed him down a bit and allowed him to explore nuance in a way he never has before. As a bonus, he plays the piano and sings himself, an extra detail musicians will no doubt appreciate. (Nothing’s worse than the disconnect of hearing a lovely piano tune as an actor flails his fingers across the keys like a faulty marionette.

(Cue “Heroes and Villains.”) Banks and Giamatti’s contributions to the film shouldn’t be understated. They’re both phenomenal, and in fact share a handful of scenes together, one of which may be the film’s best. In the throes of a nasty legal battle (Landy was Wilson’s legal guardian for a time), Dr. Landy pays Melinda a visit at the car dealership, pounding on her locked office door like a threatened gorilla, screaming obscene threats. Eventually, Melinda swings the door open. The look on Banks’ face as she stares down Giamatti is more badass than anything you’ll see in any action blockbuster this summer. She’s killer.

Wilson devotees will likely be moved to tears by Love & Mercy (“God Only Knows” is waterworks material for me no matter the context), thought the experience of the uninitiated will be no less special. This man is a certified American icon, and for his legacy to be preserved in a way that comes ever so close to matching his artistry is a wonderful thing. The film’s only major obstacle is Cusack’s resemblance issue. If you can’t get past it, you may find yourself repeatedly thrown out of the movie every time he saunters into frame. If you can get past it (it took me a while, but I did), you’ll have a film experience to treasure for years to come.

In a year brimming with outstanding performances from leading men (Redmayne, Keaton, Oyelowo, Cumberbatch, Gleeson, Hardy…the list goes on for days), Timothy Spall rose to the top as the best of the best (in my humble opinion) with his career-defining turn as British landscape painter JMW Turner in Mike Leigh’s transcendental biopic, Mr. Turner. Spall’s Turner is a walking contradiction, a boorish, unpleasant-looking man who created some of the most beautiful works of art the world has seen. With guttural groans and bestial snorts Spall manages to reveal the soul of the late artist, creating one of the most fully-realized onscreen characters in years.

In our extended interview with the British actor, we discuss his extensive research process, the difficulty of playing such a contradictory character, Turner’s greatest fear, the art of grunting, the time when he transformed into Turner in front of a frightened bartender, the difference between embodying a character and playing a character, working with Mike Leigh, and much more.

Yves Saint Laurent changed the face of fashion on numerous occasions, innovating through design, expanding the horizons of the art form like few else in the 20th century. Alas, Jalil Lespert’s tribute to the man, Yves Saint Laurent, finds itself constricted by boundaries the man it pays tribute to would have broken through. It’s got all the biopic trappings that make us groan, following the same formula that stunts 90 percent of entries in the genre, keeping them from achieving true artistry. It’s that terrible biopic irony in which filmmaker tries so hard to faithfully represent their subject’s life events, achievements, and relationships that they forget to do the one thing that would truly do them justice: Make a great movie.

Lespert focuses on Saint Laurent’s career, following the designer from his early years as artistic director of House of Dior at age 21, to his later years, when he became plagued by mental and physical illness as a result of years of substance abuse. Pierre Niney stars and fits the role of the lanky, angular-faced Saint Laurent nicely. His gradual physical transformation over the course of the film is handled well by the makeup crew, and his increasingly fidgety mannerisms and evolving anxiety meet the same standard of quality, portraying the legendary figure’s mental deterioration with respect without glossing it up (much of what we see is unflattering).

At first, Saint Laurent is a shy, unassuming boy wonder with a warm personality working in Paris. He debuts with an inspired line of clothing that garners him loads of adulation, along with which come responsibilities he has no time or patience for. The pressures of heading up the world’s biggest fashion house begin to chip away at him as he breaks into random fits of rage. The breaking point comes when Saint Laurent is drafted to the French army, prompting a mental breakdown that would mark the beginning of his steep descent into manic depression.

The film is narrated by his business partner and lover, Pierre Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne), speaking to Saint Laurent in their advanced years. While the voiceovers are nice bookends to the story (the film’s tragic final shots are particularly heartbreaking), they do little to enhance or illuminate everything in between. Bergé and Saint Laurent’s sometimes wildly sexual, sometimes wildly combative relationship is threatened several times by pretty boys Saint Laurent meets at coke parties, and more interestingly by his muse, Victoire Doutreleau (Charlotte Le Bon), who has a quick fling with Bergé. These romantic interludes only serve to sidetrack the film, offering little insight into our subject’s state of mind.

Niney embodies Saint Laurent with an anxious rage while exuding the flare of a true fashion pioneer. Almost bird-like in appearance, he slinks through his environment, timid, and yet ready to burst with fury at any second. It’s a finely constructed physical performance, but the material gives Niney little emotional depth to explore. The film views Saint Laurent from a distance, and we never feel as though we’re invited into his head. This is exacerbated by Bergé’s narration, which rears its ugly head every time we begin to feel a sense of intimacy and immediacy.

If nothing else, Lespert’s crafted an incredibly slick-looking film. The period costumes are visions of beauty, particularly the Mondrian dresses Saint Laurent was so famous for. The fashion show sequences will likely make fans of YSL weep. The film’s third act focuses too keenly on drug abuse, amplifying the tragedy of Saint Laurent’s addiction while failing to explore his inner turmoil. Yves Saint Laurent is a formulaic “fallen genius” film that represents its influential subject and the fashion industry respectfully, but it would have been a better film had it just dug a little deeper.

Yves Saint Laurent trailer

The first of what will surely be an unending wave of Steve Jobs films (Aaron Sorkin is hard at work on his) is here, and a doozy it’s not; Joshua Michael Stern’s Jobs is about as straightforward and unremarkable a hero’s story as you can imagine, never mind the elephant in the room that is Ashton Kutcher‘s strained and uneven take riff the Apple genius. Despite all its shortcomings, a few elements work: the focus on Jobs pre-iPod/iMac, the strong supporting cast, the willingness of the filmmakers to show Jobs at his darkest and most unlikable. What it comes down to is that the negatives severely outweigh the positives, a disparity that the real Jobs would have likely thrown a spitting, fuming tantrum over.

The film opens in 2001, with Jobs’ reveal of the iPod (Kutcher’s resemblance to the man is actually pretty startling.) Then, we zip back to 1971, where he’s a stinky, bare-footed, horny hippy at Reed College. He takes embarks on an LSD trip and we’re treated to one of the most idiotic-looking montages I’ve seen—Kutcher is flailing his hands like a fool in an attempt to pantomime an orchestra conductor while (you guessed it) orchestra music plays and the camera twirls around his dunce ballet. This is meant to show that he’s a genius, that mind works complexly, somewhat musically, and on a plane we can’t understand. Instead, it comes off as silly and heavy-handed. I get that Kutcher’s dumb expression is appropriate—he’s tripping balls after all—but the sequence just feels confused.

After an enlightening journey to India and some fiddling around as a technician at Atari, we see Jobs and his buddy “Woz” (Steve Wozniak, played endearingly by Josh Gad) found Apple computers (they work out of Jobs’ parents’ house). Now we dive into the meat and potatoes. Fueled by Jobs’ drive and ingenuity, company grows and grows, until it’s so big that its board of directors—who don’t appreciate the high financial risks of Jobs’ lofty vision—fires Jobs, booting him from the company he birthed in his parents’ garage. Years later, as Apple flirts with irrelevancy in the ’90s, they invite Jobs back, and he returns triumphantly (we glimpse conceptualizations of the first iMac, you know, the awesome candy-colored ones.)

The story Stern and writer Michael Whitely are trying to tell is actually a good one. The period of Jobs’ life they focus on is rife with all the trappings of a great drama. What they fumble with is getting the bits of story to cohere to a central arc. Some scenes, like one in which Jobs screams and breathes fire into a phone with Bill Gates on the other end, lead nowhere. In fact, it feels like a lot of the characters are thrown in simply to make those familiar with the Jobs story go “Ah! I know who that is!” It contributes almost zero to the narrative. “Steve, I’d like you to meet [insert name of guy from his biography].”

Kutcher puts forth a good effort. He really does. It’s clear that he’s spent days and days perfecting Jobs’ slouched saunter, his Midwest/Californian accent, and his infamously volcanic temper. Plus, he unquestionably looks the part. But, there are two problems here, the first and most important of which is that he simply doesn’t have the acting chops to carry the film. You can see it in his eyes; he’s constantly, desperately grasping at the emotion he’s trying to communicate, and when (if) he finally finds it, he gets overly excited and plays it way too big and loud. Everything he does feels magnified (his accent feels painfully forced), but that’s not the most distracting thing.

With some actors (Will Smith, Angelina Jolie), I have difficulty divorcing their character from their celebrity. Ashton Kutcher is the prime example of this barrier to belief. When I see him, I see the guy from “Punk’d” who wears funny hats and tweets on the daily. I just can’t shake it. Unlike a lot of actors, he’s made himself widely accessible to the public, which makes it nigh impossible for me to dissociate his face from his fame. I believe it’s the actor’s job to convince us of their role, to deceive our perceptions of who we think they are in reality. By this standard, Kutcher may have dug himself into a hole too deep to escape.

Kutcher does show glimpses of fine acting—some (not all) scenes where he seethes and bursts with rage are truly intense, and a pivotal bedroom breakdown (captured nicely by Stern) resonates emotionally. Whiteley’s dialogue is blunt and heavy-handed, but the supporting players have no problem making their lines count (legendary character actor J.K. Simmons plays a great jerk as a member of the board of directors.) The film isn’t the complete stinker I feared it would be; I love that it cuts off just before Jobs’ glory days (we only get a brief look at the “keynote master” Steve Jobs we’re all so familiar with), and Stern illustrates vividly his fight to conquer the mountainous challenges he was faced with. Unfortunately, the film’s major moving parts are damaged, effectively crashing the machine. Send this one back to the factory.

Jobs opens this Friday, August 16th.

Jobs trailer