“In 2011, Celeste had drunk herself blind … during a stint of binge-drinking household cleaning products.” So states Willem Dafoe’s narrator in the final act of Vox Lux, the new Natalie Portman-starring film about a globe-straddling pop star. Rather than the glitz of stardom, this is a film that lurks in the dark underbelly of the pop world.
In the first half of the movie, Celeste is a teen star-in-the-making (played by Raffey Cassidy); in the second, Portman plays a messy pop diva with hints of Madonna, Britney, Gaga, Ariana and – according to the film’s director, Brady Corbet – Kanye West. At points in between she has a daughter while still in her teens, disgraces herself with a racist meltdown and becomes implicated in a terror attack. At no point does she seem to be having fun. Maybe that’s what 21st-century pop is all about, at least in the movies, where losing credibility and suffering a tragic downfall are recurring themes.
There is a rich tradition of biopics of singers, real and imaginary, who have survived the ravages of life and put it all into their music. But they rarely put it into pop. They will put it into country (Walk the Line, Crazy Heart, Coal Miner’s Daughter or, for a more recent example, Wild Rose), hip-hop (8 Mile, Hustle & Flow, Straight Outta Compton, even Get Rich Or Die Tryin’), or post-punk indie (Control, Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, or Elisabeth Moss’s forthcoming grunge tribute Her Smell).
The destination in these movies is invariably a hard-won self-knowledge and authenticity, often sealed with an early death. Pop stories, on the other hand, tend to run in the opposite direction, focusing instead on artists selling out, and paying the price.
Vox Lux takes us through the manufacturing process. In an irony even Alanis Morissette would grasp, Celeste shoots to fame as the result of a high-school shooting. At a memorial, she performs a heartfelt ballad, written in her hospital bed, which talks of having “no one to show me the way”.
Its success launches her on to the conveyor belt: recording studios, management meetings, dance lessons, video shoots. Jude Law plays her manager. He’s a bit of sleazeball, but aren’t they all? Innocence successfully removed, we see her perform an electropop number called Hologram, written – as is much of the film’s score – by Sia.
Fast-forward a decade, however, and Celeste is demanding, chaotic and insecure, singing about being “a private girl in a public world”. What could she be trying to say? “A lot of the songs that are early on in this movie … weren’t designed for the masses,” Corbet told the Washington Post. “As the film progresses, the songs sort of change. The [later] lyrics … speak to generalities and platitudes that are a little bit like an audience having their tarot read.”
While Celeste reveals hints of Lady Gaga via her flamboyant stage outfits and dance-pop bangers, the real Stefani Germanotta has already given us her own version of this story – twice. First came her fly-on-the-wall Netflix documentary Five Foot Two, which also made pop stardom look like a total drag. Throughout the film we see Gaga in various states of misery and meltdown: getting treatment for her severe back pain (following an onstage injury), gussying herself up into a style icon for the umpteenth time, and tearfully complaining about how lonely her life is. Not even the news that the film A Star Is Born has been greenlit fills her with much cheer.
In A Star Is Born itself, Gaga’s heroine, Ally, again starts out in authentic singer-songwriter territory only to be fed through the pop machine. She is dragged into the spotlight and “off the deep end” by Bradley Cooper in that celebrated Shallow scene. But Ally steers away from country and into pop; a few makeovers and dance classes later, she is to be found gyrating with male dancers to a generic pop tune called Why Did You Do That? (“Why do you look so good in those jeans? / Why d’you come around me with an ass like that?”). Gaga stopped just short of admitting Why Did You Do That? was intentionally bad but it certainly fitted into the “selling out” story arc. Ironically, A Star Is Born has given Gaga herself some serious credibility. But as with Vox Lux, the film positions pop as the opposite of “real” music – ie Cooper’s growly rock.
In its own dodgy way, Bohemian Rhapsody also makes the same argument, and it does so within the space of a single, weird scene. It’s when bassist John Deacon introduces the band to his new song, Another One Bites the Dust. “We’re a rock’n’roll band, we don’t do disco,” protests drummer Roger Taylor. As the band pick up their instruments and get into the groove, their jamming is intercut with clips of Freddie Mercury cruising subterranean gay bars, replete with ominous red lighting and anonymous, leather-clad men – all encouraged by their manager, who’s a bit of a sleazeball and happens to be gay. Thus, Queen’s departure from straight rock and Mercury’s embrace of his homosexuality are conflated into a “beginning of the end” moment.
However, seeing how everything else has been done to death, perhaps this more critical approach to the pop movie is understandable. It’s only the odd, brave exception that transcends the polished pop film formula of shiny, artist-approved docs – think the recent Bros doc After the Screaming Stops, with its winning mix of unfiltered honesty and unintentional, unscriptable comedy (“CNN is the thinking man’s reality show”), or Andy Samberg and co’s satire Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which should have been a Spinal Tap for the Bieber/boyband era, but was sadly a box-office bomb.
Later this year comes another addition to the pop-goes-wrong canon in the form of Teen Spirit. The directorial debut of The Handmaid’s Tale actor Max Minghella and starring Elle Fanning, it takes a grittier, 8 Mile-like approach to a talent-show tale, and hammers home how these movies currently favour female performers. That could be either an insult (exploitation: so much more effective with women) or a compliment (let’s face it: women rule pop).
In any case, isn’t there an inherent irony in cinema offering a “serious” take on mass culture while seeking commercial gain? And few of these tales manage to communicate what still makes pop music so appealing and popular; when Vox Lux finally attempts to give us some unadulterated joy in its climactic concert scene, it falls flat. The tunes are indistinct and indistinguishable and, what is worse, Natalie Portman simply has no stage presence. She might have cut it as a ballerina in Black Swan but here we’re very much below the waterline, watching her paddle awkwardly through her song-and-dance routines.
If anything, she makes you realise how skilled genuine pop performers actually are. In trying to show the dark side of pop, films such as Vox Lux have forgotten why the genre – once a byword for playfulness, youth and singing into your hairbrush – is so great in the first place.
Vox Lux is in cinemas from Friday 26 April
