Michael (2026)
Jaafar Jackson is where this film earns its keep; that is where this account begins. Jaafar Jackson — Michael’s nephew, 29 years old, no prior film credits — is remarkable. He doesn’t so much impersonate his uncle as appear to have internalised him — the posture, the vocal register, and above all the precise calibration of vulnerability and authority that made Jackson watchable even standing still. A recreation of the Motown 25 performance lands with a jolt that is exactly what you came for. He earns the film more goodwill than it deserves.
Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan, traces roughly two decades of Jackson’s life — from the late 1960s, when a young Michael first fronted the Jackson 5 under the demanding and frequently punitive eye of his father Joseph, through the Motown years and out to the Bad tour of the late 1980s. Joseph (Colman Domingo, formidable) assembles his sons in their small Gary, Indiana home, drives them through rehearsals whose disciplinary methods the film acknowledges but declines to examine at length, and eventually gets them discovered by Motown’s Suzanne De Passe. Success follows, arenas fill, and the family relocates to a mansion in Encino. Michael begins to understand — and Jaafar conveys this with real feeling — that his artistic gift and his psychological wounds share the same root.
Domingo is, in my opinion, the film’s most psychologically alert element. His Joseph captures how authority and injury travel together between generations — the man who forms you and the man who damages you operating, in this family, as a single force. The film is measurably better whenever he is on screen.
Fuqua directs with craft and, in the concert sequences, genuine inspiration. The early Gary scenes have a period-specific bleakness that gives the first act a tension the second and third can’t quite sustain. The music is extraordinary. Songs this good generate their own emotional charge regardless of the vehicle carrying them, which makes it tempting to credit the film for peaks it didn’t earn.
The script offers no such compensations. John Logan has written a tidy, affectionate, and strategically selective account of a life that was none of those things. Anyone familiar with the longer arc of Jackson’s story will notice, fairly early, what the film has chosen not to include — and the cumulative effect is a portrait organised around a deliberate blind spot. Biopics produced with estate involvement regularly make this choice. Sanitised portraits of complicated people are practically their own genre.
Nia Long as Katherine and Miles Teller as lawyer John Branca do what the material asks of them — which is, mostly, to populate the margins and keep the plot moving forward. The script doesn’t give either much room, and neither performer strains against the limits they’ve been set.
Michael is the kind of film that generates warmth in the foyer and a mild, nagging dissatisfaction on the drive home. In my opinion, Jaafar Jackson deserved a script with more nerve, and the audience deserved a fuller story. What both get is a lavishly produced, sporadically engaging account of a life that retains its fascination. The fascination belongs to Jackson. The film is along for the ride.