WHAT'D I SAY? ONLY THAT MUSICAL BIOPICS OFTEN STINK.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

To Hollywood: Enough already with the pop-star biopics.

Honestly, these things are invariably the same damn movie: The rise to the top. The succumbing to easy sexual liaisons. The nightmarish descent into drugs. And, if the film is about a black icon, coping with racist cops/concert bookers/fans/nonfans.

Nonetheless, a lot of these movies end up being Oscar bait, probably because members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences relate to the twin themes of the temptations and pitfalls of celebrity. This year, ``Walk the Line,'' about country legend Johnny Cash, earned acting nominations for its stars, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. Last year, ``Ray'' won its star, Jamie Foxx, an Oscar that was as deserved as the rest of the film was predigested drivel. (It was inexplicably nominated for best picture, which can be attributed to an outpouring of affection for its subject, versatile r&b superstar Ray Charles, who had recently died, and also posthumously swept the Grammys with a pedestrian effort.)

These films always key in on the most dramatic - which is to say, lurid - aspects of their subjects' lives, their excesses. So there's always drug stuff (and sometimes harrowing rehab stuff), and there is always plenty of groupie groping involved. What there rarely is, is any examination of the actual art that made the subject worthy of a biopic in the first place.

``Walk the Line'' is a pretty fair example of the genre. Johnny Cash was one of the most complex men to enter the pop-culture pantheon. Torn eternally between the sacred and the profane, he was a man inextricably linked both to the lord and the sinners in America's penal system, a voice understanding both redemption and man's darkest impulses. His politics were similarly trickily complicated.

In the film, though, Cash simply slams back pills at a fearsome rate; he throws a fit and collapses on stage; he torpedoes his first marriage by recklessly pursuing June Carter. It's as much a shadow of the real Cash as Phoenix's vocal stylings are of Cash's own apocalyptic bass.

As David Byrne (who has yet to receive the biopic treatment) might say, same as it ever was.

Earlier films followed the same wallow-in-the-mire/ignore-the-creative-genLine is overdrawn ius formula: ``Beyond the Sea,'' about Bobby Darin; ``The Doors,'' about Jim Morrison; ``Great Balls of Fire,'' about Jerry Lee Lewis; ``Bird,'' about Charlie Parker; ``The Buddy Holly Story''; ``Sid and Nancy,'' about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols (actually, this film's stylistic anarchy verges on brilliance, even as it charts the same dreary narrative course); and so on.

``The Doors'' may represent the apotheosis of the genre's crazy excesses: The scene in which Jim Morrison, the band's lead singer, participates in a ``wedding'' with a witch, replete with blade-swinging and blood-letting and feverish sex, is a classic of over-the-top, underhanded hagiography.

There are plenty of other exceptions, and despite our pleading, there are more biopics in the works. A film adaptation of the musical ``Dreamgirls'' - itself a fictitious evocation of Diana Ross and the Supremes - is forthcoming. ``Brokeback Mountain'' director Ang Lee is has dispelled rumors that he was developing a biopic of Dusty Springfield, the British ``white lady of soul,'' but a biopic about her has long been rumored. Oscar nominee Terrence Howard (``Hustle & Flow'') is reportedly pursuing a film about r&b singer Rick James, who served jail time for sexually torturing a woman.

We're not going to be spared from the genre anytime soon. So if we're going to have to sit through these things, can we offer a couple of requests? Films about Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye would not only guarantee great soundtracks but also would both end with a literal bang. Elton John's life story might be interesting as well, but you know the filmmakers would feel compelled to build an entire scene around that stupid Donald Duck costume.

David Kronke, [phone]

david.kronke(at)dailynews.com

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Johnny Cash's drugging takes up quite a bit of ``Walk the Line,'' starring Joaquin Phoenix as the man in black.