Dancing around controversy, the empathetic ‘Michael’ bows out before getting dark

Let’s agree on two things. First, Michael Jackson was one of the greatest pop artists of the 20th century. Your personal favorite may be different and that’s fine, but there’s no arguing that “Thriller” remains the top-selling album on the planet. Second, Michael Jackson was, allegedly, a serial sexual abuser of children. These circumstances don’t contradict each other — they coexist and they hurt. Our hearts break for the victims even as Michael’s music is fused to our souls. If there’s a way to heal that wound, I’d love to hear it myself.

Once we’ve shaken hands on this unavoidable tension, we can wrestle with Antoine Fuqua’s “Michael,” an open-hearted biopic of Jackson, extending from his boyhood in Gary, Ind., to the late-’80s tour for “Bad.” The narrow scope is intentional. The two victims in the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland” contend that their abuse began shortly after; a third became the first to publicly accuse the singer of molestation in 1993. Ending the movie in 1988 allows “Michael” to hail the parts of his story that are worth celebrating — the force of talent and drive that propelled a blue-collar family into global superstardom, broke barriers preventing Black artists from receiving equal treatment on MTV and, for a moment, really did seem like it might unify the world — while not outright lying to the audience that he was always a hero. But no, it doesn’t mention the allegations at all.

Thus, we get a story of Michael’s independence from his domineering father, Joe (Colman Domingo), as witnessed by those who were there. Six Jackson family members are credited as producers and still seem to be grappling with how their freakishly gifted and damaged relative came to exist. (Meanwhile, there’s no Janet, not even onscreen in the background or mentioned at all.) The Jacksons’ biological and, presumably, financial ties to the project would raise a World Cup stadium of red flags even without Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s nephew, playing the lead.

But suffocating nepotism might be the only way for now to capture someone as singularly strange as Jackson — if Jaafar delivered a line reading that wasn’t note perfect, it’s likely that someone in his clan would pipe up and say so. Another actor would be doing an outside-in impression; Jaafar, who was 12 when his uncle died, knew him as a human being.

Jaafar is lit up with Michael’s gleaming eyes and smile and he can moonwalk. But to do the part right, Jaafar has to look ridiculous and artificial because Michael looked ridiculous and artificial. Over the running time, makeup artist Bill Corso not only slims his nose and lightens his skin, but cakes on increasingly heavy eye shadow and liner so we can register how uncommon it was that Michael wore as much makeup around the house as La Toya (Jessica Sula), who, inspired by her brother, here trims off a bit of her own nose too.

Even within the very small subset of top-tier pop acts, Jackson is separate from songwriters like Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, who channel fans’ inner emotions through their own voices. Michael was never relatable at all. He made it clear in his 1988 memoir “Moonwalk” that he had no memories of life outside of performing. He may also have been a prodigy on the scale of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But the movie has no Salieri as an audience conduit, only reaction shots from his family and bodyguard, the latter played by the quietly observant KeiLyn Durrel Jones, who shoots some of his best wary stares when Michael summons a meeting between the Bloods and the Crips, convinced that his music can create world peace.

I’d love to see a “Michael” that went truly off the wall, like the expressionistic biopics “Better Man” and “Get On Up” that channeled their artists’ essence by, say, casting Robbie Williams as a monkey or concocting a time-bending scene where a young James Brown draws strength from the music he has yet to create. Jackson’s music videos — “short films,” he preferred to call them — did that too, in abbreviation. It’s a treat to see him here on the set of “Thriller,” insisting that director John Landis show his whole, monstrous body.

Creatively, nothing in Fuqua’s filmmaking calls attention to itself. The cinematography, score and editing all stay flat-footed in deference to its lead. I feel for Fuqua’s bind. He’s a better stylist than this, but he’s made a sensible choice to balance a bizarre character with a basic tone, sacrificing his own signature to help us accept the worldview that Jackson would take a pet llama on a nighttime stroll thinking it was perfectly normal.

Even if Fuqua had made the movie like a gritty documentary, just the entrance of Bubbles the chimp would smack of camp. Fuqua allows us a giggle. But he’s hoping that the audience will pick up on his implication that Jackson adopted a noise-sensitive monkey as a bodyguard against his screaming father — a mini-King Kong to fend off his very real Godzilla.

Michael rarely explains himself and thank heaven for that. There’s nothing worse than a biopic that reduces a life to an “A-ha!” To the script’s credit, it gets across most of its ideas visually, trusting that a dozen shots of Pinocchio (in a book, a stuffed toy and on TV) will illustrate that Michael struggled to grow up and snip the strings tethering him to Joe, and that Michael’s increasingly ornate military jackets stem from a desire to project more authority over his life.

After adult Michael is ordered to be the central cog in the Jacksons’ post-”Thriller” Victory tour, the film cuts to him on the couch watching his idol Charlie Chaplin work the assembly line in “Modern Times.” Alongside that, we catch glimpses of the megastar’s effect on his siblings, like concert scenes where the spotlight is only on him, or in Tito’s choice to wear a bedazzled hat with his name in all-caps. Can you imagine knowing you’d be a standout member in any band but your own?

The film has no sympathy for Joe Jackson, whom Domingo plays as both a predator and aggravatingly savvy: half-spider, half-Mommie Dearest. It’s impressive how much he gets across in a glare. When the crowd at an early gig showers his sons with physical coins, Domingo’s expression shows offense at people treating the Jackson 5 like street performers. Likewise, it’s wrenching to realize how often his judgments are right, besides the fact that he’s literally whipping his kids to succeed. Despite his markers of making it — the oppressively over-decorated mansion, the heavy jewelry — Joe ends the film still looking dated and cheap. Pointedly, the credits pay tribute to Tito, who died in 2024, but not to the Jacksons’ paterfamilias.

As young Michael, the empathetic Juliano Valdi makes us feel the loneliness of a boy in a Motown Records recording booth facing grown-up pressures to excel. He seems to have inherited his gentleness from his mother, Katherine (Nia Long), but a ruthless perfectionism from his dad. Flinging himself onto Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate) for a hug, the kid’s impulsive need for affection is a gut punch. Later, explaining to his mom why he doesn’t have any friends his own age, Valdi purses his lips in a mimicry of the older men who would engulf him — a touchingly sad little detail.

For all its careful evasions, I believe that the Michael this movie reveals is true and worth watching. But ultimately, it’s the music that breaks down our resistance, from the opening funk beats of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to the climax, which essentially cues a greatest hits tape right when we know the bad times are about to begin. “Michael” does hint at the tragedies ahead: the coldness that sets in when the legend finds himself feeling isolated and alone, the unexplained paranoia on the bodyguard’s face on his umpteenth trip to a children’s hospital, the menacing drip-drip of the pain medications that would kill him at the age of 50.

Even so, I was startled to see the film end with the onscreen words, “His story continues.” Is that a fob-off or a promised sequel? I’d return for a miserable encore.

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