There is a moment in Michael, the new instant-smash Michael Jackson biopic, that did, I must admit, make me cry. Early in director Antoine Fuqua’s schematic film, young Michael (Juliano Krue Valdi), is still on the other side of the wall, the one he will eventually disappear over, into the fraught rest of his life. Then he is only an abused child with a glorious talent, longing to avoid the punishments of his domineering father, Joe (Colman Domingo), to do well by his brothers, and to cuddle up with his doting if enabling mother, Katherine (Nia Long). He is a kid with a whole family precariously on his shoulders; a minute of pure childhood freedom is precious and rarely realized.

Thus, I cried watching this Michael read his favorite storybook, Peter Pan, as an escape to an alternate forever-youth, where days are spent on boyhood adventures and the sky shimmers with fairytale glow. What a heartbreaking image, of a child about to be swallowed up and trying, for just a second, to disappear in a different direction altogether, into the transporting and comforting realm of imagination. 

After all, Michael Jackson was a kid once. And, to its dim credit, Michael does a fair accounting of the fact that his childhood was essentially stolen from him. Maybe the movie doesn’t show the full extent of Joe’s cruelties, or the needy grasping of other adults in his orbit, but we are at least told, in no uncertain terms, that Jackson’s early years were sad and lonely. The film may argue, with a note of triumph, that he turned that pain into music for the whole world to love. But for the duration of the film, I couldn’t get past the thought that maybe none of the music was worth it. Struggle often breeds good art, sure. But it is hard to root for the existence of the latter when the former was so annihilating to the person at its center—and (allegedly) to many others who eventually came into contact with it. 

Michael is a tricky object. By some measures, it is a deep act of empathy for its subject, urging audiences to look beyond the tabloid freakshow—the voice, the clothing, the glove, the nose, the chimp—and at the fragile person cowering behind it. That is, in a vacuum, a worthy message, a reminder that celebrity often obscures humanity, and that the postures and tics we see as bizarre or risible may actually be manifestations of a primal yearning and insecurity deserving of our sympathy. 

But this film doesn’t actually exist in a vacuum, of course. It is consecrated, and produced in part, by the Jackson estate, and it is, in all its compassion for a young Jackson hurtling into the stratosphere, doing an obscuring of its own. 

It is not just that the movie stops so abruptly in the late 1980s, just before allegations of child sexual abuse began to follow the singer. (The producers say, and a title card at the end of the film suggests, that there may be a sequel.) It’s that much effort has already been made by the film to contextualize Jackson’s relationship with children and childhood as something pure of heart, a profound and generous reaction to the sacrifices Jackson made in his own life in order to entertain us all. There are several pointed scenes in the film in which Jackson interacts with children ailing in the hospital, as if to say, See, see, that’s all it was. It’s telling that the movie finds the time to do that, more than once, but doesn’t have a second to mention, say, The Wiz. 

Jackson is a rough-handled saint throughout, a tragic angel bathed in warm light. He is sweet and innocent; the drive of his adolescent ambition only pushes him so far. Yes, he learns to demand things of record executives, and of his family, but it is only because he needs deliverance from the violent aggressions of his father’s limited sight; Michael’s clear and almost divine vision must be realized as only he can see it. He’s not a diva about it, he’s not some fame-mad tyrant. He is simply sure in his purpose. His tame rebellion successful, he then reverts to talking softly to animals or being good to his mother or nobly devoting one last stretch of invaluable career time to supporting his brothers. 

In that vacuum, it is easy to be drawn in by the strange figure Michael pities and exalts. Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s nephew, plays him with a feathery lilt so delicate it’s like watching a slant of light. He is achingly pretty of face and voice, as if a revered castrato of old. The movie treats him as something even more desexed than that, though: there is not a single mention of desire anywhere in the film, even though a solid two thirds of it take place during the singer’s teens and early 20s. This is, of course, entirely deliberate, and may be persuasive enough for some distracted viewers. If one knew nothing about what all that omission is working to shroud, one might not even notice the lack

As is true of most music biopics, Michael rolls out hit after hit—sung in studios and on stages, in music videos and in living rooms—to paste over narrative gaps, to give the audience what it came for, to reify the boggling depth (and value!) of a storied career catalogue. This music was massive for a reason, and I was guiltily swept up in the individual glory of those artistic achievements, the way Jackson’s best songs gathered from the past, rooted themselves in the present, and reached for the future all at once. They are pretty miraculous, and the filmmakers would like to keep them as mysteriously sourced as that word suggests. We see little of the creative process in the film. There are some montages of Jackson considering what shape Thriller might take as an album, but the discrete songs are largely treated as things plucked whole from the wondrous aether of Jackson’s mind. 

The point is that they were inevitable. And thus that Jackson himself was inevitable, despite (or because of?) the hardships he faced. And if he was inevitable, then anything or anyone from the outside that might stand in his way must be operating from some malign place: envy or greed or cruelty. Who would dare try to besmirch or tear asunder this precious, heartsick child, this dreamy post-teen with his eyes on the stars, this caring creature who did nothing more than realize a higher power’s calling? Well, an opportunist would dare, a cynic who sees malevolence where only its opposite exists. To even infer what those hospital visit scenes might be countering is to be unseemly, is to prove that the person doing the inferring is the one with the sick mind. 

The movie has, thus far, been pretty successful in its defiant emotional appeal, at least with ticket-buying audiences. It worked on me more than it seems to have on other, perhaps more principled or discerning critics. I did not forget where I was and what I was watching, but my basic compassion for a kid being driven toward greatness and ruin—long before he did or didn’t do anything he is accused of doing—lingered longer than I thought it would. 

I was reminded, vaguely, of this peculiar moral experiment. If only I could ascribe that film’s artful inquiry to the curious provocations of Michael, its beatification of someone who might have turned into a devil. What a nervy film that would be, one that sought to illustrate a frightening, and frighteningly pertinent, conundrum of transcendent art and troubled artist, legacy and bitter history, fame and infamy. 

But that is not what this film is doing, is it? I will allow that some people involved—many, even—genuinely did want to pay loving homage to an artist they sincerely believe was railroaded and smeared, someone who no doubt has meant a great deal to them as they pursued their own passions. Churning just beneath its makers’ devotion, though, feeding off of it just as it does the ardency of fans, is the greed that begins this whole story. The hungry willingness to exploit and cover up, to urge a child to lie about his age so that the world may be all the more in awe of him. Such innocence! And such marketability, too.