Is Natalie Portman about to play Sinéad O’Connor? Well, anything is possible. The only evidence we have, however, is an unnamed source for the Sun newspaper. “Natalie is the actress the film-makers want to play Sinéad,” the shadowy figure explained. “They think she is the spit of Sinéad in terms of her physicality.”
The two stars are, indeed, not unlike in appearance. The actor is almost exactly the same modest height as O’Connor was. Handy stills of Portman with shaven head, in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, do something to bolster the shaky case. But this still sounds little more secure than the talk of Nicole Kidman playing Michelle Smith in the wake of the Irish swimmer’s success at the 1996 Olympics.
It does, nonetheless, seem that a biopic is in development. A recent report in Variety comes with a comprehensive list of writers, producers and production companies. “The film – which is understood to have been in the works since 2022’s Nothing Compares doc – is being directed by Josephine Decker,” Alex Ritman’s story explained.
The news did not land to unqualified hurrahs. No surprises there. By the time of her death, in 2023, O’Connor had passed through endless cycles of controversy to find acceptance as a secular icon. She spoke truths that Ireland didn’t want to hear. She seemed unafraid of ridicule. Mourning was intense.
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Many who snorted at her tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, the US television show, in 1992 came eventually to accept that as an act of inventive and necessary defiance. She did, at least, live long enough to get a sense of the wider affection.
“I think she deserves all that, to be honest,” Kathryn Ferguson, director of the excellent Nothing Compares, told me 10 months before O’Connor’s death. “I just think it’s so overdue and she’s been treated horrifically. And I just think it couldn’t come soon enough. It’s just a dire shame it’s taken this long.”
So, one can understand how the country might scowl at an attempt to make drama of O’Connor’s troubled life and tragic death. The music biopic is a compromised form. Jake Kasdan’s satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, from 2007, laid out all the cliches without dissuading successors from revisiting each and every one. The magical discovery. The drink-and-drugs hell. The late-career redemption.
Even a decent film such as James Mangold’s recent A Complete Unknown, featuring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, fell into a couple of those traps. There were a few too many associates rocking back in slack-jawed wonder at the first airing of songs that surely took longer to register. So what? For all its embrace of Walk Hard cheesiness, Bob Marley: One Love became an unexpected smash on release last year. There is still money in these things.
The concern in this case, however, is with a specific, unlovely strand of music movie: those that take relish in the decline of female stars. More than 50 years ago Diana Ross was strong as the doomed Billie Holiday in the fitful Lady Sings the Blues. More recently we have had Naomi Ackie as the doomed Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance with Somebody and Marisa Abela as doomed Amy Winehouse in Back to Black. None of these films is terrible. The leads are all excellent. But one leaves with an uncomfortable sense of a memory being exploited.
It need not be that way. And it often has not been that way. The dominance of the Walk Hard tendency has overshadowed the work of thoughtful directors who have found imaginative, sometimes experimental strategies for processing the life and work of musicians. Todd Haynes and his many faces of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Alex Cox making a nightmarish fairy-tale of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s decline in Sid & Nancy.
Portman herself was superb as a kind of distraught fictional hybrid – a bit Bowie, a bit Gaga – in Brady Corbet’s annihilating Vox Lux, from 2018.
So, though supporters of O’Connor can be forgiven their trepidation over any dramatic treatment, such a project, if placed in the right hands, could still deliver a worthy, challenging contribution to the legend.
The Variety story tells us that Decker will be directing a script by Stacey Gregg. Promising (if true). Gregg did good work in Ballywalter and Here Before. Not everyone loved Decker’s Shirley as much as I did, but that study of Shirley Jackson, author of The Lottery and I Capture the Castle, broke every rule in the biopic handbook. It has as much to do with Jackson’s weird classic Hangsaman, from 1951, as it does with the author’s difficult life.
So we can, for now, travel hopefully. Or the project may never happen. In which case forget everything I’ve just said.
