It’s rare—and in micromanaged blockbusters, often impossible—for an actor’s performance to be so good it not only enhances the movie, but inverts the script’s intended meaning. Twelve-year-old Juliano Krue Valdi, who stars as young Michael Jackson in the first act of Antoine Fuqua’s grotesque biopic, does precisely that. Michael opens in Gary, Indiana, where Joe Jackson (an exhausting Colman Domingo) lords over his wife, Katherine (Nia Long), and the handful of his ten children for whom this film’s producers could secure the life rights.
Joseph has a cruel and domineering air about him. He drags Michael, Tito, Jackie, Marlon, and Jermaine to nightclubs and talent shows, and when they return to the little house on Jackson St., they are belittled and forced to rehearse until they erase that night’s mistakes.
For the rest of the film, it’s taken for granted that Michael wanted to become a star—that his father’s abuse was, if not a necessary evil, something he endured en route to what was always inevitable. We hear a few variations on the idea that Michael needs to “shine his light on the world,” and by his early adulthood, any ambivalence he had about superstardom appears to have been replaced by a hunger for more of it.
However, what the young Valdi captures on these early scenes is the sense that whatever love Michael had for music and performance had become immediately corrupted. Without emoting, Valdi expresses his desire for a normal childhood: it feels at once like the default for someone his age and a longing intensified by his experiences on tour. Michael loves Katherine, but Valdi manages to play the distance between them that grows when he realizes his mother can’t, or won’t, save him from his father. Valdi single-handedly shifts the argument from Child stardom is difficult to Child stardom should not exist at all.
Toward the end of that first act, during the Jackson 5’s first session at the Motown studios in Los Angeles, Michael seems, briefly, free. He stuns Berry Gordy (a wonderfully sensitive Larenz Tate) with his voice. Later, we see Michael and Gordy alone in the studio, the executive showing his new signee how a mixing board works. It’s tender, but it’s difficult to avoid reading a predatory undertone: This is a record executive, after all, and on what basis is he qualified to be alone with this child, other than the potential for this relationship to earn the child’s parents millions of dollars? When Joseph pops his head into the studio, insisting, over Gordy’s objections, that Michael has taken up too much of his time, Michael hugs Gordy goodbye. It’s a moment that could exist at the center of an infinitely more complex, infinitely more honest film.
It would be ridiculous to divorce Michael from the troubled production history, or from the role it presumably plays for the Jackson estate and everyone with a financial stake in Michael’s catalog. The scaffolding here is a string of biopic clichés and blips of unsubtle brand management. The publicity campaign has been stomach-turning: Fuqua’s implication, in The New Yorker, that men who accused Michael Jackson of sexually abusing them when they were children are lying to make money, is merely the clearest articulation of an ever-present subtext: that Michael, who’s been accused of sexually abusing children across years and around the world, is a victim of a vengeful “media.”
(An earlier cut of the film reportedly began after he’d first been accused of those crimes in 1993, and had a third act that dealt with the case; the Jackson estate, which had somehow overlooked a clause in a settlement agreement barring commercial depiction of his accuser’s story, paid for extensive and expensive reshoots, as the film moved roughly a year from its planned release date.)
