musician biopics

There’s a movie being made about Iggy Pop. Guess who’s playing him? No, not Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Nope, not John Cameron Mitchell. It’s Frodo. Mr. Elijah Wood. Poor kid is picking up a lot of flak for this role. He’d better pull it off.

There are several other music biopics in the pipeline somewhere. The success of Ray and Walk the Line have caused a lot of money to be thrown at this ‘genre’. Not that I’m complaining. Here’s what I’m looking forward to:

The mysterious Jimi Hendrix biopic: rumored to be directed by Quentin Tarantino, and often rumored to star either Andre 3000 or Lenny Kravitz (Gary Dourdan who plays Warrick on CSI would be another good choice). This film had been plagued by many problems, mostly, obtaining right to the songs. The film seems to be dead in the water.

Gospel According to Janis, starring Zooey Deschanel, whom I love. This one is for real, and will be coming out in 2008. Strangely, Pink was originally supposed to star in this. The director is none other than Penelope Spheeris, who also did The Decline of Western Civilization.

Control, about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, just debuted at Cannes this year. Sure to be uplifting, it stars Mark Smith from 24 Hour Party People.

Don Cheadle will play Miles Davis

The one that I will watch most closely is the planned Kurt Cobain biopic. Rumors are that it will star Ewan McGregor. I can see that. Courtney, please don’t fuck this up.

Spike Lee is rumored to be directing the James Brown biopic.

Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, and Tupac biopics are vague rumors. Others I would expect to spring up are Willie Nelson and Elliott Smith ones. How about Dimebag Darrell?