💽 Plot & how the story is told

The story begins by following the early life and rise of Michael Jackson, starting with the Jackson 5 in Gary, Indiana, in the 1960s.

His father, Joe Jackson, pushed his children hard from a young age, rehearsing them for hours and demanding perfection. The film doesn’t shy away from showing how strict, and at times frightening, that pressure could be, even as it clearly shaped the group’s early success.

Michael’s mother, Katherine, is shown as a steadying, gentler presence throughout his childhood, often the person he turned to for comfort after difficult rehearsals or difficult moments on the road.

As the group’s success grew, Michael increasingly became its focal point, and the film traces his gradual shift from a member of a family group to a solo artist in his own right, hungry to prove himself beyond what his brothers or his father expected of him.

The film also spends time on his relationship with Motown itself, and later with CBS Records, showing the tension between an artist wanting full creative control and a label wanting predictable, marketable hits.

The film’s centrepiece is the making of Thriller, released in 1982, still the best-selling album of all time.

One of the film’s most celebrated sequences recreates Michael’s performance of the moonwalk during a televised Motown anniversary special, a moment widely credited with changing the culture of live performance overnight.

From there, the story moves into the Bad era — the album, and the accompanying world tour — before the film ends, choosing not to follow Jackson into the more complicated and controversial chapters of his later life.

The film also spends real time on the business side of that rise — the deals, the contracts, and the people negotiating on Jackson’s behalf. Music attorney John Branca and CBS Records executive Walter Yetnikoff both feature prominently, showing how much careful legal and financial groundwork sat behind the music itself.

Now, let’s talk about how this story is told, and it’s worth comparing Michael to another recent film here: Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic. Critics have made this comparison often, and for good reason — both films focus heavily on the joy and spectacle of their subject’s musical genius, both were criticised for smoothing over the messier, more difficult parts of their subject’s real life, and both, despite that criticism, became enormous audience favourites regardless. You can see the same pattern playing out here: a film more interested in celebration than confrontation, and audiences who, for the most part, came looking for exactly that.

📖 Vocabulary spotlight

Alongside our main grammar focus, this episode also has five bonus vocabulary words for you, pulled from how critics have actually described this film.

💬 Online discussion

Now, let’s talk about how Michael has actually been received, and why the reaction has been so unusually split.

Critically, though, the response has been far less kind. The film holds just a 40% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with many reviews arguing it plays more like a loving tribute than an honest, complete biography, and that the story ends abruptly, well before some of the more complicated chapters of Jackson’s life.

Audiences have responded completely differently. The film holds a remarkable 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the highest ever recorded for a film in this genre, alongside an A- CinemaScore, a rating based on the reactions of opening-weekend cinema audiences specifically.

Much of the online conversation right now isn’t really about whether the film is good or bad — it’s about this exact gap. Some viewers argue critics are judging the film by an unfair standard, wanting a warts-and-all documentary rather than the celebratory concert-film experience it’s clearly aiming to be. Others side with the critics, arguing that choosing not to address the more difficult parts of someone’s life at all is itself a meaningful creative decision worth criticising.

Either way, this split has already made Michael one of the most talked-about box office stories of the year — a film the public has embraced far more enthusiastically than professional critics have.

Some critics have drawn a broader comparison here too, to the 2022 Elvis biopic directed by Baz Luhrmann — another film built primarily around performance and spectacle, that similarly divided critics while still connecting strongly with general audiences. It’s beginning to look like a pattern across this whole recent wave of music biopics: audiences consistently reward the spectacle and the songs, even when critics want a harder, more complete look at the person behind them.

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