Joe Coscarelli

You know, I'm thinking of Last Days, which is the Gus Van Sant movie that is very obviously about Kurt Cobain and his suicide.

It's this very, very eerie, quiet, dark sort of art house look at one of the biggest rock stars of the 1990s.

On the flip side of that, Alex Ross Perry made a movie called Her Smell a handful of years ago.

That is sort of a cobbled together version of a lot of female 90s rock stars, both from the grunge era and Riot Grrrl.

You know, you might see some Courtney Love in there.

You might see a little bit of Kathleen Hanna in there.

But it is a fictional version that feels truer to that world or that life or even those characters than someone actually trying to impersonate them.

He's in the post-credits sequence to tease the sequel.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

About a band with a song better than a Beatles song.

And, yeah, that twist, that sort of trick of following the loser is, I think, a great frame for a biopic that can be about a legend but not get bogged down in the details.

I'm thinking also of Amadeus, which tells the Mozart story through Salieri, his father.

A peer who's obsessed with him and hates him because he's a mediocrity, as he calls it, and can't believe what it's like to be in the presence of this idiot genius.

Like, it takes the air out of Mozart in this way where, you know, you're expecting this looming sort of all-knowing genius, and instead you get this...

pervert with an annoying giggle, and you have Salieri being like, I can't believe that this work is coming from this guy for almost three hours.

Following The Loser, also one of my favorite music movies, Eden, a French film by Mia Hansen Love, which sort of tells the story of somebody on the periphery of Daft Punk, of the 90s French electronic music scene.

And, you know, you get flashes of them, but you're following a guy who doesn't make it.

And that, I think, can tell you more about the world that these people are coming from and just sort of frees up the storytelling and the filmmaking.

You know, I come back to this question a lot with a movie like the Dylan one, which I enjoyed, and also with the Springsteen one, which is like...