Listicle: 10 biopics that felt true to life

Massey played a small-town man who becomes an IPS officer despite poverty, failure, and countless rejections in 12th Fail (2023). It could so easily have been melodramatic. Instead, Massey’s performance shows the cost of hope: The exhaustion of endless exams, the quiet heartbreak of missed chances. He picked up Sharma’s mannerisms too, rare for a biopic of an everyman.

OK, we’ve seen Murphy as Scarecrow in Batman Begins, as a gullible napper in Inception. But as the director of the Manhattan Project in Oppenheimer (2023) he seemed even more chilling. Murphy’s Oppenheimer voice sounds like it carries the weight of the Manhattan Project itself. He brings out the physics genius and the guilt-ridden Father of the Atomic Bomb. It’s a haunting performance.

RiP, SSR; you were MSD, FR. He knew what he was signing up for with M.S Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016). He trained for months to copy Dhoni’s unique wicket-keeping gait and crouch, right down to the way he removed his gloves between overs. But it was the quieter moments that hit harder: The long gazes from the train window, the shy half-smile when love came his way, the way his shoulders relaxed after a win.

When you’re playing the Flying Sikh, you can’t exactly phone it in. For Bhaag Mikha Bhaag (2013), Akhtar’s physical transformation was only part of the prep. He also had to play a man who was running from his ghosts. His Punjabi diction felt lived-in, silences carried as much grit as the dialogues, Singh himself praised Akhtar’s head-tilt. Did your lungs burn too, when you saw Akhtar reach the finish line?

Before Scam 1992 dropped in 2020, most of us knew Harshad Mehta from long-ago headlines. Gandhi turned him into a pop-culture phenomenon. Those suits were a perfect fit, but the easy swagger, the calculated pauses before a big pitch – they’re all Gandhi. Even in crowded courtroom scenes, Gandhi stood out, letting arrogance and vulnerability flicker in the same glance. Sheer genius.

Margot Robbie didn’t merely play the figure-skater in I, Tonya (2017) she got us to look beyond the competitive athlete and see Harding as human. She nailed the thick accent, the strut, the rage. She trained for months on the ice, performing most of the skating sequences by herself. It rewired how audiences remember Harding and not how tabloids made her out to be.

For Neerja (2016), Kapoor was tasked with bringing to life a 23-year-old flight attendant who saved more than 350 lives during the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73. She could have gone the easy way and played a hero. But she simply played her as a woman who felt the fear but refused to show it. As the hostage drama plays out, we never quite know what Bhanot was thinking. But we do know what it takes to stand up to evil.

This is the actor who showed us what biopics ought to be, with My Left Foot in 1989. With Lincoln (2012), the subject was better known, the stakes higher. Had 23 years rusted his skills? Not our Day-Lewis. He hails the 16th US President’s look. But reimagines him as simply a man on a mission, who doesn’t know he’ll be shot dead in four months. It makes the quiet energy of the performance that much more poignant to watch.

The opening scene of The Social Network (2010) tells you everything you need to know about Zuckerberg, the OG tech-bro with more ambition than conscience. That’s Eisenberg at work, using pitter-patter dialogue, disappearing into a hoodie to avoid accountability, smirking at the world he will soon disrupt. Women? Never smart enough. Friends? Collateral damage. Harvard clubs? A clique he’ll never crack into. Viewers aren’t supposed to like Zuck by the end. Eisenberg makes sure they don’t.

In a world of Elvis impersonators, be an Elvis sympathiser, the way Butler plays him, in Elvis (2022). Of course there’s the swagger, the signature moves, the low mumble. But there are also the haunted eyes of an artist trapped in his own legend, a man who has everything except a way to manage fame, addiction, and exploitation. It’s a harrowing story. And Butler makes sure you see the truth despite the blinding rhinestones.