A View From the Couch: The Beautiful, Hollow Tribute at the Heart of Michael

Rating: 6/10

There is a version of this review that writes itself, and it is the easy one.

The music is extraordinary. The choreography is faithful. The casting, across the board, is some of the most inspired work this genre has produced in years. By the time the lights come up, you will have had a genuinely good time.

But there is another version of this review, and it is the one that actually matters, because Michael arrived with the opportunity to do something far more ambitious than deliver a good time — and chose, deliberately, not to.

Musical biopics are very much in fashion right now. Rocketman gave us Elton John as a man nearly consumed by everything fame handed him. A Complete Unknown gave us a young Dylan as a closed door that an entire scene couldn’t quite force open. Bohemian Rhapsody, for all the ways it sanded down the rougher edges of Freddie Mercury’s life, still let him be difficult, lonely, and occasionally cruel on screen.

Michael sits in that company and plays an entirely different game.

The Two-Hour Concert Problem

At its core, Antoine Fuqua’s film is a concert experience with biographical connective tissue threaded between the songs.

Two hours of some of the finest music ever recorded, performed with a precision that borders on uncanny, stitched together by scenes that exist primarily to get you to the next number.

As spectacle, this works. It is genuinely entertaining, and there is real craft in how seamlessly the film moves between eras, costumes, and stages.

The trouble is what spectacle alone cannot do. It cannot make you sit with a person. It can only remind you why you already loved them — which, for a film about Michael Jackson, was never going to be the hard part.

This is, in the end, a safe film. Safe because the music does the emotional work the script declines to do. Safe because nostalgia is doing the heavy lifting, and nostalgia rarely asks difficult questions.

Jaafar Jackson and the Weight of Bloodline

If there is one decision that elevates Michael well above where its script would otherwise leave it, it is the casting of Jaafar Jackson — Michael’s own nephew — in the lead role.

This could so easily have been a stunt. A headline-grabbing piece of trivia that collapses the moment the cameras roll.

It isn’t.

There is something in Jaafar’s movement, in the angle of a turn or the snap of a shoulder, that no amount of choreography rehearsal alone could produce. It feels inherited rather than performed, and the film is smart enough to let the camera sit with that.

It is, frankly, doing an enormous amount of work. The lead performance is magnetic enough to carry long stretches where the screenplay itself has remarkably little to offer, and that is no small achievement for a first-time screen actor stepping into one of the most scrutinised roles in recent memory.

The Door Left Ajar

Buried inside Michael is the outline of a genuinely important story — one the film touches, acknowledges, and then quietly closes the door on.

The Jackson 5’s rise happened inside an industry, and a country, that was openly hostile to Black artists crossing into the cultural mainstream. The film gestures toward the scale of what that required: the discipline, the gatekeeping, the sheer improbability of five brothers from Gary, Indiana becoming the biggest act on the planet.

It is a context that even the most devoted fans tend to take for granted, flattened by decades of record sales and moonwalk reenactments into something that feels inevitable rather than extraordinary.

And then the film moves on to the next song.

This was the thread worth pulling. Not for controversy, and not for mudslinging — simply because it is the actual story. The one about a once-in-a-generation talent forcing open doors that had been bolted shut for everyone who came before him. Michael knows this story is there. It just doesn’t go looking for it.

The Patriarch in the Shadows

The closest Michael comes to genuine friction is Colman Domingo’s Joe Jackson.

There is a charge to his scenes that the rest of the film doesn’t quite have — a sense of a household run on a discipline that occasionally tips toward something harder, something that shaped five boys into a hit-making machine before any of them were old enough to vote.

For a moment, the film seems ready to sit with that. It whets the appetite.

Then it doesn’t follow through.

Nia Long’s Katherine Jackson is exactly as warm and steady as the role requires, but the film never quite lets us inside the family dynamic that produced both the music and the man. We get the appetiser. The main course — what that pressure cooker actually did to the people living inside it — never arrives.

It is a frustrating omission, because the bones of a genuinely great family drama are visible underneath the production numbers. Michael simply declines to dig for them.

The Strangeness Nobody Wanted to Examine

There are brief moments where the film allows Jackson to be odd. Private. Operating on a frequency that clearly ran differently from everyone around him.

These are, without question, the most interesting moments in the entire film — and they are treated almost as throat-clearing on the way to the next musical number.

Here is the thing about strangeness in artists of this calibre: it is very rarely incidental. The same wiring that makes a person difficult to read is often the wiring that produces Thriller. The film seems to sense this, brushes against it, and then retreats to safer ground before it has to commit to an opinion.

Even the more eccentric corners of Jackson’s later life — the Neverland of it all, the theme-park sensibilities — could have been explored with genuine curiosity rather than judgment. The film had the opportunity to humanise that strangeness instead of simply omitting it. It chose omission.

The Fawning Problem

There is a particular kind of reverence that biopics extend to their subjects when the subject’s own estate has a producing credit, and Michael wears that reverence openly.

I have never fully understood the instinct among music fans to want their idols presented as flawless — it is a fascinating phenomenon in its own right, and probably deserves its own conversation entirely. But there is also a sizeable audience, myself very much included, that is at least as curious about what happens before the lights come up as what happens once they do.

Bohemian Rhapsody understood this. It let audiences walk away with complicated feelings about Freddie Mercury — good and bad — because it asked for genuine emotional investment in him as a person, not just as a back catalogue.

Michael asks for applause instead. And it gets it, because the music is the music. But applause and investment are not the same currency, and only one of them survives the drive home.

The Verdict

Michael is a beautifully assembled tribute, anchored by a lead performance that feels less like acting and more like inheritance, surrounded by a supporting cast — Domingo, Long, Miles Teller’s Branca among them — who are uniformly excellent and uniformly underused.

As two hours of entertainment, it delivers. As a portrait of one of the most complicated figures the music world has ever produced, it barely breaks the surface.

The good news is that this story isn’t finished. A sequel covering the second half of Jackson’s life is reportedly already taking shape, and that is the chapter where the real drama — the tension, the contradiction, the things that make a generational talent genuinely generational — actually happened.

Michael leaves that door wide open. This first instalment does just enough to make sure I’ll be there when it does.

This review is part of my ongoing film and television coverage at A View From the Couch. If you have found value in this analysis, please consider supporting the work — via the Medium Tip Jar or Patreon. Every contribution keeps these reviews coming.