Forget Back to Black. Here are eight great fake music biopics

Making a movie about an iconic musician can be perilous – there are so many stakeholders with differing versions of events, and so many diehard fans looking for a perfect representation of their hero, that many music biopics end up being sanitised and glib.

Although many of them are thinly veiled studies of real celebrities, the freedom offered by creating a character – such as Blake, the Kurt Cobain stand-in in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days – can allow for endless interrogation into the mindsets and motivations of artists.

But Velvet Goldmine, telling the story of a Bowie-style glam rock star called Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) through the lens of his fans, lovers, collaborators, and the press, has just as much to say about the nature of fame and creation.

There’s a lot to love about the fourth Star Is Born remake – good songs, a dry sense of humour, Lady Gaga’s luminous debut film performance – but it’s just as worth watching for its complex, discomfited, ultimately unresolved attempt to reconcile celebrity and artistic achievement.

Its beats are painfully familiar – early tragedy, meteoric rise, infidelity, experimentation with drugs, downward spiral, late-career triumphant return – to the point that you start to wonder if it should be required viewing for anyone seeking to make a rock biopic.

The most incredible thing about Spinal Tap might be the fact that, 40 years after its initial release, it still feels like the definitive music industry satire: a wry, straight-faced parody of self-indulgent “rockumentaries” that unearths infinite truths about the egos and artistic ambitions of many famous bands, as well as the airheaded support teams around them.