Let me be upfront with you: I have a complicated relationship with biopics.

On one hand, I genuinely love a well-crafted biographical film. When the right actor inhabits the right real-life figure and the whole thing just clicks, there’s a kind of electricity to it that pure fiction can’t always manufacture. You’re not just watching a story — you’re watching someone reach across time and hand a historical person back to you, slightly reconstructed, but somehow more alive than a textbook ever made them feel.

On the other hand, I can also see the machinery turning. I know what’s happening when a trailer drops in the fall featuring a beloved actor doing a funny voice, losing or gaining significant weight, or struggling against some great personal obstacle. The gears of awards season are grinding, and the biopic is the genre that’s been greasing those gears for decades. So yeah — mixed feelings. Enthusiastic mixed feelings, but mixed feelings nonetheless.

Let’s talk about why the biopic works so well at the Oscars. And let’s talk about what that formula is actually doing to the truth in the process.

The Formula Is Real, and It Works

If you’ve watched enough awards seasons, you’ve probably noticed that biopics tend to follow a pretty recognizable structure. Take a real person — ideally someone famous, beloved, or historically significant. Find the part of their life that was the hardest. Cast someone surprising but credible. Let them transform. Submit in September. Collect in February.

It sounds cynical when you put it that way, but execution matters, and these films occasionally transcend their own formula in genuinely moving ways.

The King’s Speech (2010) is maybe the purest expression of this recipe ever committed to film. Colin Firth plays King George VI, a man who could not get through a public address without a debilitating stammer, at the precise moment in history when the entire world needed to hear his voice. The stakes are enormous — Britain is going to war — and the obstacle is achingly personal. It’s not a film about geopolitics or battlefield heroism. It’s a film about two guys in a room trying to get the king to stop getting stuck on his Ws. And somehow that is riveting.

The film earned twelve Academy Award nominations and won four, including Best Picture, Best Director for Tom Hooper, and Best Actor for Firth. It was the most-nominated film at that ceremony. It was also, depending on your feelings about historical accuracy, approximately 74% true — which is a number I find both reassuring and mildly alarming. But more on that in a moment.

Lincoln (2012) operates similarly. Steven Spielberg took the final four months of Abraham Lincoln’s life and zeroed in not on his assassination, but on the political maneuvering required to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. Daniel Day-Lewis disappears so completely into Lincoln that it stops feeling like a performance somewhere around the first twenty minutes and just starts feeling like… Lincoln. The film received twelve Oscar nominations and Day-Lewis won Best Actor for a performance that even historians with long lists of complaints about the movie’s accuracy couldn’t quite bring themselves to criticize. It’s that kind of performance — the kind that makes you forget to nitpick.

That’s the real magic trick at the center of the biopic formula. If you get the lead performance right, audiences will forgive almost everything else.

The Performance Is the Point

There’s a reason the acting categories at the Oscars are dominated by biographical films year after year. Playing a real person offers an actor something that original screenplay characters simply cannot: a built-in measuring stick. You can compare the performance to archival footage, to photographs, to recordings, to cultural memory. And when an actor clears that bar in a way that feels genuinely illuminating rather than merely imitative, something special happens. The audience doesn’t just believe the performance — they feel grateful for it.

Eddie Redmayne’s portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (2014) is a good example of this phenomenon. He spent six months researching the role, watched every piece of interview footage he could find, studied Hawking’s speech patterns and physical deterioration — and then had to recreate that deterioration non-chronologically across a film shoot. Hawking himself watched the finished film and reportedly was moved to tears. Redmayne won the Oscar for Best Actor. The film itself received mixed-to-positive reviews and some legitimate criticism for prioritizing the love story over Hawking’s scientific contributions. But nobody argued that Redmayne hadn’t earned his trophy.

Reese Witherspoon won Best Actress for Walk the Line (2005) by doing something similar — she learned to play instruments, trained her voice to approximate June Carter Cash’s style, and delivered a performance so full of warmth and barely concealed tension that Roger Ebert, who praised the film significantly, basically predicted her win in his review. Joaquin Phoenix sang every note of Johnny Cash’s music himself — something that left Ebert, who knew Cash’s catalog well, briefly closing his eyes in the theater just to focus on whether or not it was really Cash he was hearing. (It wasn’t. But Phoenix made it close enough to matter.)

Meryl Streep won her third Academy Award for The Iron Lady (2011) for a portrayal of Margaret Thatcher that drew near-universal praise even as the film around it received decidedly middling reviews. Rotten Tomatoes has the film sitting at 51% — not exactly a glowing endorsement — but Streep’s performance was called “astonishing and all but flawless” by The Guardian’s Xan Brooks. The film effectively became a vehicle for one extraordinary piece of acting, surrounded by a script that couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to say about its subject.

That’s actually one of the more interesting patterns in this genre. The performance can be so good that it functions as a kind of protective shell around a mediocre or structurally flawed film. The movie gets to win the award. The movie also gets to be kind of a mess. Both things coexist.

The Truth Is a Flexible Concept

Here’s where my mixed feelings about biopics get the most complicated: the historical accuracy problem.

Every one of the films we’re talking about takes liberties with the truth. Some of those liberties are small and defensible. Some of them are more significant. And the filmmakers themselves are generally pretty open about this, which I actually respect more than I’d expected to.

The King’s Speech tightened a timeline that actually spanned about ten years of treatment into what feels like a much shorter arc. It reversed Winston Churchill’s well-documented opposition to the abdication crisis — Churchill historically supported Edward VIII, not the Duke of York, but having Churchill in the pro-George camp made for better drama and, as one of the film’s advisors noted, the average viewer knows who Churchill is. They don’t know who Lord Halifax is. So Churchill got repurposed. The film still comes out at roughly 74% accurate by one analysis, which the same analysis summarized as “some nips and tucks of the historical record, but mostly an accurate retelling of a unique friendship.” I’ll take it.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) plays considerably faster and looser. The film has Queen breaking up before Live Aid, then dramatically reuniting — which never actually happened. Mercury’s HIV diagnosis in the film comes before Live Aid; in reality, it came two years after. Songs are performed in the wrong decade. Characters are composites or inventions. One analysis placed the film at about 79.9% accurate, which sounds better than it is when you realize the inaccuracies include rearranging Mercury’s HIV timeline for maximum emotional impact. That’s not a small thing to move around for dramatic effect. Screenwriter Anthony McCarten essentially acknowledged this, saying they were making a movie, not a documentary.

The frustrating thing is that Bohemian Rhapsody sits at a 60% on Rotten Tomatoes and received some genuinely scathing reviews — one critic at IndieWire gave it a D+ — and yet it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture at the Golden Globes, and grossed over $910 million worldwide. It became the highest-grossing biographical film of all time until Oppenheimer came along. Audiences absolutely loved it. The critics largely did not. Both camps had defensible positions.

Which brings me to the thing I find most fascinating about this genre.

Why Audiences Show Up Anyway

Here’s the honest truth about biopics: audiences aren’t primarily going to see them for the history. They’re going to see them for the feeling.

A well-made biopic, even a loosely accurate one, offers something that’s genuinely hard to manufacture elsewhere: the sense that you’re connecting with a real human life. Not a fictional one. An actual person who existed, who struggled, who persisted, who meant something to the world. When Rami Malek stands at the edge of that Live Aid stage and the crowd of 72,000 people starts to roar, it doesn’t really matter that the film got Mercury’s HIV timeline wrong. Something true is happening emotionally, even when the facts have been rearranged.

The King’s Speech was praised specifically by the British Stammering Association for its “realistic depiction of the frustration and fear of speaking faced by people who stammer on a daily basis.” That’s not nothing. A film can take liberties with Churchill’s political positions and still help a person feel less alone in their struggle with their own voice. Those two things don’t cancel each other out.

Erin Brockovich (2000) is an interesting case study here because the real Erin Brockovich herself called it “probably 98% accurate” — which makes it something of an outlier in this genre. Julia Roberts won every major acting award that existed at the time, becoming the first actress to sweep the Oscar, BAFTA, Critics’ Choice, Golden Globe, and SAG Award for a single performance. Critics were divided. Audiences loved it. Roger Ebert, famously, gave it two stars and found it unfocused. Andrew Sarris called it “the best of independent cinema and the best of mainstream cinema all in one package.” Same movie. Wildly different reactions. This is kind of the biopic experience in miniature.

So Does the Formula Work?

I keep coming back to this question: is the biopic’s dominance at awards shows a sign that the Academy has a soft spot for a certain kind of prestige filmmaking, or is it evidence that this genre is actually doing something consistently valuable?

Probably both. The Academy does love a transformative performance and a tastefully lit period setting. That’s not exactly a secret. But the best of these films — the King’s Speeches and Lincolns of the world — earn their accolades by using the real-life framework to explore something genuinely human and universally resonant. George VI’s stammer isn’t just a speech impediment. It’s about every person who has ever felt inadequate for a role they didn’t choose. Lincoln’s political maneuvering isn’t just a history lesson. It’s about the gap between idealism and the grinding reality of getting things done.

The weaker entries in the genre — and Bohemian Rhapsody, for all its entertainment value, has to be counted among them critically — tend to mistake the formula for the substance. They get the transformation, they get the rousing climax, they get the title card explaining what happened to everyone afterward. But they don’t always get the truth, either factual or emotional, and somewhere in the edit bay, that absence starts to show.

Do I enjoy biopics? Yes, with reservations. Do I think they deserve their outsized presence at awards shows? Sometimes. Occasionally a biopic is the best film of its year and deserves every trophy it collects. Occasionally a biopic wins everything because it’s the most technically accomplished version of a very familiar genre, and nobody wants to have the fight.

The genre will keep producing both kinds. And I’ll keep showing up for them, probably, because every once in a while one of them hands you something genuinely irreplaceable: the sense that you actually understand, even briefly, what it was like to be someone else — someone real, someone whose life actually happened, someone who might have stammered on their W’s but still found a way to speak.

That’s worth something. Even when the Churchill stuff isn’t quite right.