There are some lives that seem almost impossible to fit into a two-hour film. Michael Jackson’s is certainly one of them.
Michael, the much-awaited biographical drama on the King of Pop, has now arrived on JioHotstar in India, giving audiences who missed its theatrical release another chance to revisit the life of one of the most celebrated — and complicated — performers of all time.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan, the film stars Michael Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in his feature-film debut. Colman Domingo plays his father, Joe Jackson, while Nia Long plays his mother, Katherine. Juliano Krue Valdi takes on the role of the young Michael.
The casting of Jaafar was always going to be one of the biggest talking points around this film. Playing Michael Jackson is not simply a matter of recreating the dance moves or putting on the famous glove. It means stepping into a life that has been watched, picked apart and re-litigated for decades.
Jaafar brings an unmistakable familiarity to the role. But once the story rewinds to the Jackson family’s early years, it is Valdi’s young Michael who carries some of the film’s most affecting scenes and that is where Michael really begins. Not with the global superstar. Not with the moonwalk. Not with stadiums full of screaming fans. But with a child.
Before the King of Pop, There Was a Boy
The film opens with Michael walking onto a stage before cutting back to his childhood and the Jackson family’s rise. From there, it follows him from one of the young Jackson 5 performers to the artist who would eventually become a global phenomenon. Rather than attempting to fit his entire life into a single film, the story concentrates on his early career and rise to solo stardom, ending around the late 1980s.
But watching it, I found myself thinking less about the superstar and more about the boy. Because one of the first things Michael makes clear is that fame was not something Michael chose entirely for himself. It was shaped for him by his family — and, more specifically, by a father determined to make his sons succeed at almost any cost.
Within the first few minutes, Joe Jackson’s parenting philosophy is summed up in a line that lands almost like a warning: “In this life, you’re either a winner or you’re a loser.” It tells you almost everything about the environment these children are growing up in.
There is little room for being tired and even less room for excuses. The boys are expected to rehearse, work harder and become better than everyone else. The film lingers on the smaller details that make this pressure feel real: the children have school the next morning, they are visibly exhausted, and yet the rehearsal continues.
It is a version of parenting many people may recognise in a much milder form — the parent who has already decided what their child should become and is determined to get them there. Except Joe’s ambitions go far beyond wanting his children to do well. He wants them to perform. He wants them to win and Michael, more than anyone else in the family, proves that he can.
The Price of Becoming Extraordinary
That is what makes the early scenes so uncomfortable. The same childhood that is producing an extraordinary performer is also, in the film’s telling, taking ordinary childhood away from him. Michael depicts Joe physically punishing Michael, making clear that the pressure is not simply professional or verbal.
That part of Jackson’s childhood is not merely cinematic invention. Michael himself spoke publicly about being physically disciplined by his father. In his autobiography Moonwalk, he wrote that mistakes during rehearsals could result in being hit with a belt or switch, and he later described intense fear of his father in interviews.
Katherine, played by Nia Long, emerges as a loving mother who nevertheless seems unable to fully counter her husband’s authority and somewhere in the middle of all this is a little boy becoming famous before he has had much opportunity to understand what fame means. Michael can walk onto a stage and command a room. But offstage, there is a persistent sense that he is not really being allowed to live as a child.
What Happens When Childhood Becomes Work?
This is where Michael becomes more interesting than a straightforward biopic about the making of a music legend. It leaves you with a harder question: What happens when a child spends his formative years being told to perform, compete and win, while ordinary parts of childhood — rest, play, friendship, school and the freedom simply to be young — are repeatedly pushed aside? and the bigger question still: What happens when that child grows up? Psychology cannot answer that question neatly.
Research on adverse childhood experiences, commonly known as ACEs, has found that exposure to violence, abuse and prolonged stress during childhood can have lasting effects on emotional development, relationships, learning, health and the body’s response to stress. Toxic stress can affect developing brain and stress-response systems. But that research does not provide a formula. It describes patterns seen across populations. It cannot tell us that one particular childhood experience inevitably produces one particular adult behaviour.
That distinction becomes especially important when discussing Michael Jackson. It would be too easy — and too simplistic — to look backward at every unusual aspect of his adult life and attach it to childhood trauma. The film does not give us the right to diagnose him. But it does make it difficult to ignore what Michael himself repeatedly said: that he believed he had missed something fundamental by becoming a working performer so young.
He spoke openly about watching other children play while he was working and about feeling that he had lost much of his childhood and once the film has shown that childhood this plainly, later images associated with Jackson — Neverland, amusement rides, games and his repeated public fascination with childhood and innocence — inevitably acquire another layer of meaning. Not an explanation. A question.
The Childhood He Kept Looking Back At
Perhaps that is the most interesting thing Michael leaves behind. Not the question of whether one event “caused” another. Not an attempt to use psychology to solve Michael Jackson. But something simpler and much harder: What does a person do with a childhood they feel they never really got to have?
Michael Jackson grew into one of the most successful entertainers in history. He also repeatedly spoke about what that success had cost him when he was young. Those two truths do not cancel each other out. A childhood can produce discipline, skill and extraordinary achievement while still containing fear, exhaustion and loss.
Perhaps that is why the young Michael stays with you long after the performances, costumes and familiar songs have passed. Before the world called him the King of Pop, he was a child being taught that there were only two possibilities in life: winner or loser. Michael leaves you wondering what might have been different if, somewhere between those two choices, he had also been allowed simply to be a boy.
