Biopic: A Podcast Story

Sara and Rena welcome the brilliant fashion journalist Roxanne Robinson for the 2009 film Coco Avant Chanel (that means “Before” for anyone who hasn’t been using their 2025 existential crisis to re-learn French on Duolingo). By being “before” Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel became an icon, we can skip over the grossness of Coco’s who Nazi thing, and focus instead on the ambitious, very talented designer who wanted women to be free, comfort...

The most meaningless standoff in American history is commemorated in a manner it deserves: a speechifying hagiography that’s actually about the political beliefs of its star and director, John Wayne. Davy Crockett (the awesomest dude who ever lived, according to this film), Jim Bowie (the second awesomest dude who ever lived) and William Travis (just kind of an okay dude) join forces to protect a fort (that has a basement, BTW) for...

Rena and Sara dive into this unflinching look at the life and times of the singular Dewey Cox, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. 

We discuss: What if Nate Cox had survived? Why didn’t Don MacLean include Dewey in “American Pie”? How important are blankets in recovery from addiction? Is twelve too young to get married? What is the “Short Power” movement, anyway? … And so much more as we unpack Jake Kasdan’s se...

Have you ever wanted to watch a movie about paint drying? You’re in luck. Sara and Rena are joined by Fry and Bry from Pontifacts to discuss the “will he or won’t he” tale of Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel starring the NRA’s Charlton Heston and alleged murder and confirmed monster Rex Harrison as Michelangelo and Pope Julius II, respectively.

And that’s it. That’s the plot. Will he finish the painting? 

We discuss wh...

It’s a special week of watching Sara’s absolute favorite biopic, Bob Fosse’s masterpiece Star 80 (Note: All Fosse movies are masterpieces). Star 80 tells the story of Dorothy Stratten, a lovely young woman who would become Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1980 and had a massive future ahead of her, and how Paul Snider, her despicable partner, murdered her in a jealous rage spiral. Toxic masculinity, our society’s obsession with yo...

It’s the movie that, along with Ray, spawned a hundred other movies that follow this precise template, Walk the Line. James Mangold’s film about the addict-y and self-destructive parts of Johnny Cash’s life has earned some mockery over the years for its one-way ticket to Clichéistan, but is that criticism warranted? Well…sometimes. 

We discuss the unbelievable charm of Reese Witherspoon, how James Mangold engages in the most stunni...

Happy birthday to Rena and Roger Daltrey! We’re delighted to be joined by the brilliant Elana Levin from the Graphic Policy podcast (https://graphicpolicy.com/radio/, on Bluesky @Levin) for the completely bananas, wildly original Lisztomania, Ken Russell’s 1970s musical biopic on the first rock star, Franz Lizst. 

In this super-sized episode, we’re talking about birthday boy Roger Daltrey, a Roger Daltrey voodoo doll, phallus-laden...

We buckle up for the inspiring but also totally depressing story of Shirley Chisolm, the fearless Brooklynite who became the first major-party female candidate for President. Shirley is inspiring because she has class, style, incredible smarts, and is a preternaturally gifted politician. Shirley totally bummed us out because [gestures around at the trash-fire trainwreck that is 2025, and Americans’ racism and misogyny and how they ...

Responsible for this podcast’s existence and our term “Eazy-E Crying,” Straight Outta Compton is a straight-up delight — a biopic about the seminal rap group NWA whose excellence defies “and-then-i-ness,” that gets inside the joy of the creative process and manages to do non-cloying fan service. While the film is not without flaws (glossing over some pretty intense misogyny and some pretty serious abuse allegations), it’s pretty gr...

Description: Black History Month continues, and numerical kismet isn’t the only thing we love this week: We LOVE 42, the 2013 biopic about Jackie Robinson’s first year as the first Black Major League Baseball player. The late, great Chadwick Boseman is, of course, brilliant, but so is Harrison Ford as sportsball manager Branch Rickey, a man committed to desegregating MLB. Which, spoiler alert, is what happens as Jackie Robinson joi...

It’s our first episode in Black History Month, and we’re starting with a bang – the story of one Harriet Tubman. Ms. Tubman is among the historical figures whose life most closely resembles that of a Marvel hero, so her moment was long overdue. But if you have to wait, at least you get the superlative talents, brilliance, and star power of one Cynthia Erivo playing Harriet. 

While witnessing the unfathomable courage of Harriet Tubm...

How DOES it feel to be a total genius? It’s a burden for our dear friend Bob Dylan. A Complete Unknown is a big hit and is nominated for a billionty-five Academy Awards, so we went to the theaters to experience what might be the most sincere, prestige-y portrait of a ridiculously talented douchebag in the history of filmmaking.

Sara and Rena mostly love this, because of America’s high school English teacher Pete Seeger and his sinc...

We recorded around three hours of material for “Episode 20: Reagan” back in August of 2024. That movie was torture to endure and we wound up cutting about half of what we recorded. We assert that the right to free assembly allows us, the much-loathed coastal media types, the right to seek hope, comfort, and the mutual salving of wounds among the like-minded. So, this bonus episode is not for everybody. If you are broken-hearted abo...

In honor of Sara’s natal day, we attempt to deconstruct her weird obsession with character actors as we enjoy this delightful film about the blacklist and one of its central heroes, Dalton Trumbo. Absent from the film are twin douchenozzles Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, but present are douchenozzles like real-life blacklisting masturbator Louis CK and a bowdlerized version of nightmare gossip hack Louella Parsons (she was even worse I...

How gorgeous is Sofia Coppola’s delicious, vibes-filled Marie Antoinette? So gorgeous that we brought on a special guest, Belle, the host of Silhouettes: The Fashion History Podcast, to discuss.

In addition to Belle’s deep expertise around the era, we discuss Kirsten Dunst’s perfection, the meta-level brilliance of Sofia’s cast (who better to play Louis XV than Rip Torn, a madcap actor with a secret family?), how Marie Antoinette c...

How do two astonishing gifted women—director Marjane Sartrapi and actor Rosamund Pike—make a movie together about 2x Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and have it come out this boring? Start by combining masterful visual style with dull, on-the-nose words, and then add weird, apocryphal character quirks (Marie Curie is afraid of hospitals for … reasons) and stick the most interesting elements of the story in the epilogue cards (Marie ...

We all are Spartacus this week. Sara and Rena watch this astonishing epic that masterfully Trojan-horses a bunch of crazy messages about communism, righteousness, and self-sacrifice in a movie that pretends to be about toxic masculinity and oiled-up, 1950s-fit men gladiating.  

Of course we love this movie: So much Peter Ustinov, so much Stanley Kubrick being forced to work within the rubric of the studio system, so much Dalton Tru...

People wanted this, so we did it, and one of us is WAY happier about it than the other. Is Bohemian Rhapsody an efficient, joyful look at the life and genius of Freddie Mercury and his fellow geniuses in Queen, or is it a Wikipedia-skimming, nightmarishly-edited, lie-filled romp through fan-service hell? Things we can agree on: Adam Lambert is unconvincing as a truck driver, Bob Geldof’s fame is mystifying, and Mike Myers should no...

Maria is nominally about a profoundly gifted opera singer, but seems a bit more about how ponderous and remote character studies never fail to trap the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Two hours of visiting Paris (aka Budapest) as it would look if Jesus raptured the city and left behind only Satan and a few journalists, with some diversions to the shared cinematic universe of fellow sad gal Jackie Kennedy, left us exhau...