recently saw a screening of Ray, a mediocre film with a dazzling centerpiece performance by Jamie Foxx. Such a disappointment. I walked in there ready to cry, to be moved, to shout and holler and I dunno, find Jesus or something--but the closest I got was popcorn kernels in my teeth and a full-body cringe during the movie’s corny final moments.

Afterward, in the parking lot, a friend and I got to talking about how disappointing most biopics are. Chaplin, Man on the Moon, Pollock, The Doors—each a lame film fueled by a great performance. And I’m not sure exactly why this is, except that the burden of imagining the private life of a famous figure must pose a creative crisis for the screenwriter, who must script characters uttering such inanities as, “Wow, Ray, no one has ever fused gospel with R&B like this before.” It reminds me of the painful moment in Pollock when Marcia Gay Harden, playing Pollock’s wife Lee Krasden, must deliver the absurdity, “Pollock, you really cracked it open this time.” Who says these things? Of course, in a biopic about my own life, you would find I respond to most art with the phrase, “Whoa. That’s awesome.”

Anyway, this got us thinking about whether or not there had actually been a good biopic. He suggested Coal Miner’s Daughter. Having seen that film at six years old and never again, I countered with Amadeus. (And does that count? After all, a “celebrity biopic” suggests we know factual details about the person’s life, facts to which the author must cohere. Amadeus is about as factual as Shakespeare in Love.) This fall a series of high-profile biopics come out – Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin, Johnny Depp as JM Barrie, Leonardo diCaprio as Howard Hughes – all of which will probably fall victim to the same curse. In a time of celebrity puffery and estate-holding relatives with litigation at their fingertips, a good biopic may be, sadly, impossible.