A biopic about Michael Jackson was always going to be difficult to get right. The man's life had everything: genius, spectacle, trauma, controversy, contradiction, and a level of cultural impact that most filmmakers have never had to contend with. You are not just making a movie about a person. You are making a movie about an icon that shaped the childhood memories of hundreds of millions of people, and those people have opinions. Director Antoine Fuqua took on that challenge with "Michael," which arrives in theaters April 24, and the early critical consensus is that the film did not rise to the occasion.
The numbers are rough. "Michael" opened with a 32% score on Rotten Tomatoes as early reviews landed, and critics have used words like shallow, uninspired, and surface-level to describe the film's handling of one of the most complex stories in music history. The criticism is not that the movie is incompetent. The production values are clearly there. The criticism is that the film plays it safe in places where the audience needed to be challenged, and that it skips over the complexity of Jackson's later years in favor of a narrative that prefers spectacle to depth. For a subject this layered, playing it safe is its own kind of failure.
What the critics are largely not criticizing is Jaafar Jackson, who plays his uncle in the lead role. Reviews that call the film shallow consistently carve out an exception for the performance itself. Jaafar captures the movement, the voice, and the specific combination of vulnerability and presence that made Michael Jackson magnetic. That is not easy. Jackson was one of those performers where even skilled imitators eventually reveal the gap. Jaafar does not fall into that gap. His performance gives the film a core that holds, even when the script around it does not.
The cast around him includes Nia Long, Laura Harrier, Miles Teller, and Colman Domingo, which is not a group assembled without intent. Fuqua brought real actors into this project, and the supporting performances have been noted positively in early reviews. The problem according to critics is structural. The film covers Jackson's life from his time with the Jackson 5 through his solo career peak, but ends before the period that would demand the most honest examination. The movie closes with a tagline indicating the story continues, signaling a sequel is intended to cover what the first film left out. Whether audiences will wait for that sequel after the reviews this first installment received is a genuine question.
Janet Jackson reportedly declined to have herself portrayed in the film, which is its own statement. La Toya Jackson attended the premiere amid a health update that drew attention away from the film itself. The Jackson family's relationship with this biopic has always been complicated, partly because family members were involved in shaping it and partly because any serious account of Michael Jackson's life involves things the family would prefer to see handled carefully. That tension between authorized narrative and complete truth is visible in the final product, at least according to the critics who have seen it.
The commercial outlook for the film is not clear. Biopics with weak critical reception can still perform at the box office when the subject matter has a deep enough fanbase, and Michael Jackson's fanbase is as devoted as any in entertainment history. The catalog alone creates a gravitational pull. Audiences who grew up with "Thriller," "Bad," and "Off the Wall" will want to see the story told on screen regardless of what critics say, and opening weekend will tell us whether that devotion translates to tickets sold.
For the legacy of Jaafar Jackson specifically, the film may still be a turning point regardless of how it performs. Taking on the role of your uncle, one of the most recognizable human beings in history, and coming out of early reviews with your performance cited as the film's strongest asset is not nothing. That kind of foundation can lead somewhere if he is selective about what comes next.
The conversation around "Michael" is also happening inside a broader moment for music biopics as a format. The genre has had hits and misses throughout the 2020s, and audiences are paying closer attention to whether these films have something real to say about their subjects or whether they are extended concert documentaries dressed in dramatization. "Michael" seems to land closer to the latter by most accounts, and that is a problem worth paying attention to for anyone developing the next music biopic in development.
The film opens April 24. The reviews are out. The argument about whether this was the right way to tell this story is just getting started.