MICHAEL Review

Michael Jackson is a complicated subject for me. Not because of why you might expect, though. Like most who have consumed any (pop) culture over the past fifty years, The Jackson 5, The Jacksons, and Michael Jackson especially have been not just a part of my life, but a large, even life-altering part. I am the oldest of five children, ten years between my youngest brother and myself with only one sister separating two sets of boys. From the time the youngest was in diapers my three brothers and I performed together. Because we were a group of singing and dancing brothers, we inevitably incorporated those record-setting first four singles from The Jackson 5 into our act. In fact, through to our final performance together in 2014, we would often end our sets with the "I Want You Back/ABC/The Love You Save" medley from the "Triumph" tour recording. This naturally branched into learning/incorporating post-Motown Jacksons records into our shows and, of course, countless solo offerings from Michael. Whether it was our "Michael" doing the whole of the "Billie Jean" routine, performing "Thriller" at every show in October, or perfecting the "Dangerous" routine from the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards for my senior year talent show, the amount of artistry this single human being encompassed was not lost on me. As I matured, I was confronted with the allegations leveled against Jackson and though I don't overlook or discount this aspect of the individual Michael Jackson was they are very much not a part of the story this film is telling. That said, the point of any music biopic is to investigate the artist further, attempting to make sense of the why and how they produced the art they did, but maybe this is precisely why Antoine Fuqua's Michael is more a concert than it is a contemplative or thoughtful piece of introspection. 

Michael Jackson was an enigma by intention (“I wanna be mysterious.”) yet this film does nothing (new) to uncover either what made him the way he was or why he chose to be that way. The movie is most brave when it dares to confront fans with the obvious that was never spoken of (the nose jobs, the physical fallout from the Pepsi commercial) and is at its best when Jaafar Jackson and Juliano Krue Valdi are performing from what is irrefutably one of the best catalogues in all of music, but even if the film only zeroed in on the how/why such a meek man like Michael made such aggressive and often times angry music, why his social to stage persona shifted so drastically, the result would be ten times more enlightening than the carousel of greatest hits we've both heard (re: his discography) or seen (re: The Jacksons: An American Dream) before. What makes Michael worth the time and effort though is that Michael Jackson is the template for how to perfectly balance quality and commerciality to the point even in its most shallow of re-creations the music and visuals never ring hollow.

Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo) looks on as his sons perform and garner interest from Motown.
Photo by Glen Wilson/Lionsgate/Glen Wilson/Lionsgate - © 2026 Lionsgate

After seeing the film a second time I was obviously more capable of wrapping my arms around the intent instead of simply being wrapped up in my own expectations. The resentment of Colman Domingo's Joe being the throughline - and how they emphasize him goading young Michael into making eye contact with him as a young performer through to him only doing so while on stage during the final night of the Victory Tour – indicates a higher level of artistry and thought than your typical “concert film” might receive, so the dismissal as such is unwarranted. I get it, it is almost easier to complain about what the movie is not than assessing what it is. So, what is it? What do Fuqua, screenwriter John Logan, and the Jackson estate at large seek to accomplish with this film (or films)? This is seemingly why there is such a conflicted nature within the movie as there is clearly a distinction between the purpose the film needed to serve and the one the filmmakers wanted it to. Upon knowing what to expect as far as the structure of the story and which parts of Michael’s life would be included one of the first things that becomes obvious is the amount of heavy lifting a lot of insert shots and character looks are doing; the entire point of KeiLyn Durrel Jones' Bill Bray is to more or less exist as a device through which to utilize these looks in order to emphasize time and time again that Michael is the victim and that he is who the audience should be rooting for against Joe’s gross, exploitative nature. This is not an unexpected approach as anyone who watched The Jacksons: An American Dream on repeat on VH1 in the early aughts can tell you yet because it is so obvious it cannot help but feel uninspired.

This approach certainly plants the seeds for what any sequel will be unable to avoid in so far as Michael attempting to recreate the experience of the childhood of which he was deprived. The film, largely through the repetition of the music and recreation of his live performances via Jaafar, display why Michael Jackson was a singular talent, but what it fails to convey is both how isolating the repercussions of his talent made him feel while never transcending the idea these songs, dance moves, and music videos were not foregone conclusions; that had he chosen to retreat from the spotlight rather than breaking away from his brothers and pursuing a solo career, none of these things would exist…there would be no Michael Jackson as we know him today. The film does identify Michael as someone with a tremendous amount of whimsy and creativity with concepts and ideas he feels the need to express and that he knows are more ambitious than what he might accomplish from within the group and with his father at the helm but jumping from 1971 to ‘78 removes what are likely the years in Michael’s life where the most organic growth took place; this interim moment where he had the opportunity to find his footing without the suffocating fame brought on by his solo career. The fact that either Logan chose to overlook this time in Michael’s life or that the estate saw these years as inessential to his story makes it clear what the existence of this movie is truly about.   

Michael Jackson (Jaafar Jackson) rehearses for the "Beat It" video with authentic L.A. gang members.
Photo by Glen Wilson/Lionsgate/Glen Wilson/Lionsgate - © 2026 Lionsgate

The cardinal sin in the majority of these music biopics or movies about famous people is that they more often than not get lost in the drama of their subject's lives rather than focusing on the process of why the ways in which this particular person created their art was special or at least popular enough to warrant a film about them. What it actually takes to get from a lyric to a melody to an arrangement or in whatever order inspiration decides to strike is completely glossed over despite our titular character saying multiple times how he has all these ideas and lyrics in his head. The audience is never truly privy to the source of such inspirations or, as previously mentioned, doesn't bother to break down what could have been an electric sequence that combined sound and image by utilizing a montage or vignette to illustrate Michael and Quincy Jones’ (Kendrick Sampson) songwriting process. Breaking the songs down by tracks, instrumentation, and building the lyrical discussions out as the music elements begin to intertwine would have been one of the multiple angles that might have better conveyed what it felt like to be in the room for some of these things. Fuqua clearly knew what he had in Jaafar though, to the point that aside from the single moment dealing in the increasing amount of fan mail Michael was receiving, there are next to no directorial flourishes. The close-ups on IV drips in the burn unit and Michael covering his vitiligo with the single glove are subtle storytelling flourishes, but we're largely asked to settle for deducing who Michael is or who this film would like him to be rather than analyzing who Michael became. This keystone of a shortcoming is representative of the film as a whole as Michael covers so much time and so many events purely through exposition it turns moments and interactions that could be feature films in their own right into such transparently simplified sentences that the movie almost feels as if it doesn't take place in the real world at all, but more so in the world Michael would have ideally existed in.

To the film’s credit, Michael Jackson very much existed in his own world and his own reality of sorts, but we aren’t quite to that time period in Michael’s life with what is presented in this proposed first half of a story that is clearly intended to be continued. Though conflicted at its core, the charisma of the performances are undeniable, the attention to detail is out of this world, and no matter how much one might quibble with both the world the film creates around Michael or how it positions him within it the music and the way in which the film mixes it in and throughout these milestone moments make for one hell of a thrilling experience (pun intended). There is a line in the film that occurs when Michael, as a child, is speaking with his mother (Nia Long) and responds to her questioning by saying he is unable to play with kids his own age because they never treat him like another kid and that he never knew what it felt like to belong. In many ways, this should be the thesis of Logan's script, mapping how this early sense of isolation somehow morphed into a desire to be the biggest star in the world - an objective Michael states outright to his manager John Branca (Miles Teller) - yet rather than examine the psychology of such an arc we're simply given a sequence in which twenty year-old Michael whispers a few affirmations to himself while creating "Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough" out of thin air which is both the biggest problem with the movie and also sums up why it has become so accessible and such a phenomenon.