Strange and Experimental Literary Biopics

Though we seem to be positively drowning in music biopics recently, writer biopics appear to be few and far between. In a way that makes sense. Watching someone write is up there with watching other exhilarating human activities like sleeping and breathing. But there's hope! One creative solution I’ve found has been filmmakers who chose to adapt the writer's life in that writer’s own artistic style, letting their real life and their creative life intermingle in provocative ways. Sidestepping a strictly factual account of their subjects, these films instead ask: what kinds of thoughts consumed them, what ideas disturbed, obsessed and delighted them? The miraculous way these authors managed to make readers share these feelings and obsessions is as essential a fact of their lives as almost anything else. What does that look like?? What am I talking about?? Keep reading!

Adapting the year or so before the publication of her novel Hangsaman, Josephine Decker’s Shirley (2020) follows Fred and Rose Nemser, two young newlyweds who move into the cavernous, cluttered home of famed author Shirley Jackson. Quickly, though, things seem to be amiss. Where are Jackson’s four children? And why is Jackson acting so strangely, playing mind games on Rose, flirting with her, getting her to steal things, undermining her marriage, And yet is it possible she’s trying to help her? Decker’s film creates a sort of alternate history/lost manuscript hybrid where the author of macabre classics like The Lottery, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle appears as one of one of the twisted, unpredictable characters she was so famous for creating. By the film's conclusion, viewers may find themselves in a daze, unsettled and not sure how to feel about what they’ve just seen. Just the way Jackson would want them.

Hey, wait, Bob Dylan’s not a writer! Well, according to the judges of the Nobel Prize in Literature he is, and word is they know something about this kind of thing, so we're going to go with it! Plus, Todd Haynes's 2008 film I'm Not There is not so much about Dylan’s music as the worlds and characters he conjured up. Casting not one, not two, but six different actors, (including Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Cate Blanchet!) each playing a different facet of Dylan’s ever evolving persona and bound together through evocations of his life and lyrics, Haynes transports hardcore Dylan fans to a wholly unique world. One strange and familiar at the same time.

Featuring a similarly fractured approach to his subject, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters intersperses the life of the great Japanese novelist with scenes from three of his novels, together exploring themes of humiliation, sexual experimentation, and idealism. Schrader’s genius comes in the choice to make these literary scenes feel extra artificial, filming them on elaborate, vividly colored stage sets. As Mishima attempts to manufacture a sort of novelistic ending to his own life, leading a catastrophic failed coup to bring the Japanese emperor back to power, Schrader contrasts the “perfect” controlled environments of fiction with the chaos and anticlimax of real life.

Many of us here in America probably haven’t heard of Armenian national poet Sayat Nova, and yet the film of his life, Nṛan guyně, is probably the most memorable of any on this list. Though split into chapters like childhood, youth, and death, director Sergei Parajanov's film takes a left turn away from traditional plot, instead creating a kind of visual poetry. Using a method known as “tableaux vivant” where actors are not so much directed as arranged, and featuring costumes and props so gorgeous they would make any modern-day art director’s head explode, Parajanov creates beguiling images that only get more mesmerizing and complex as the film goes on. Parajanov’s visuals make the world seem to hum with energy and meaning, much the way Nova’s poems may have in his time.