Out of tune: why does Hollywood struggle to capture pop stardom?
Pop psychodrama Mother Mary might look and sound the part but it’s the latest failed attempt to turn the life of an arena-touring singer into a compelling movie
For anyone with even the slightest interest in Hollywood, it is not entirely surprising that Anne Hathaway recently appeared on Popcast, the New York Times critics’ podcast that has become a premier destination for music promotion. After all, the actor – whose last appearance in a musical bagged her an Academy Award – is a major part of one of the best recent movies to show pop stardom on screen. No, it’s not Mother Mary, the new A24 psychodrama for which Hathaway is making the press rounds as a world-famous diva in the midst of a spiritual and sartorial crisis. I’m thinking of The Idea of You, the improbably glossy 2024 romance in which Hathaway’s 40-year-old divorcee hooks up with a much-younger singer who looks suspiciously like Harry Styles.
The Idea of You successfully conveyed the idea that Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine) was the breakout star of a crushable 2010s boyband with a feral fanbase called August Moon. And by “successfully conveyed”, I mean the film remixed a string of One Direction-esque iconography – the jaunty rock-lite choruses, fizzy cheerfulness and class clown antics – into actual music videos and convincingly banal bops. The bar is low; many, many films have created bespoke pop stars and/or music for alternate cultural histories, but vanishingly few transcend pastiche. To be an echo is, generally, enough.
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