Unpacking Performance in the Pop-Rock Biopic

Pop-rock biopics have developed a range of strategies to render historicized performances, especially those considered as pivotal in a musician’s biography. The goal of such films is not merely to narrate the historical impact of live events, but to “re-perform” them for a composite audience, partly familiar with, yet partly experiencing the music for the first time. By highlighting that performance scenes have constituted moments of technical virtuosity throughout the genre’s history, I suggest that pop-rock biopics be regarded as witnessing devices to shifting paradigms of performance affordance in film. In translating live musical experience into an audio-visual narrative medium, these films reactivate the performative potential of past events and allow us to reflect on their intermedial constituents. I draw on examples taken from different stages of the genre’s history, showing how they variously include combinations of constructive devices, which, going beyond issues of verisimilitude, conjure up hyper-real experiences that trigger notions of presence, memory, and nostalgia.