Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024).
Imagine a famous pop star is in your living room. They are eyeing your family photos, surveying your belongings. They are sitting at your rickety piano, treating you to a private concert. Nobody knows this celebrity is at your ordinary house, breathing your ordinary air. You can hardly believe it yourself.
Strangely, this fantasy—or nightmare, depending on your attitude—transpires in not one but two hits of the summer movie season, vastly different films that share an interest in the machinations of modern celebrity. In Trap (2024), the new thriller written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, the scene is fraught with suspense: Lady Raven, a megastar played by Saleka Night Shyamalan (the filmmaker’s daughter), is visiting the home of a young fan whose father is a serial killer. In Michael Showalter’s rom-com The Idea of You (2024), based on the novel by Robinne Lee, it is playful and romantic: a boy-band heartthrob (Nicholas Galitzine) flirts with his decidedly not-famous love interest, a gallery owner played by Anne Hathaway.
Welcome to the year of the fictional pop star. In a fractured media landscape where pop fandom offers the closest thing we have to a monoculture, Hollywood (and Broadway!) is trying to keep up. Fake pop stars are taking down serial killers. Fake pop stars are falling in love with MILFs at Coachella. In David Adjmi’s hit play Stereophonic, and in the well-received streaming series Daisy Jones & the Six, fake 1970s pop groups that sound an awful lot like Fleetwood Mac are making it big and sleeping with each other and bickering in the studio and doing ungodly quantities of cocaine. And in the Japanese director Daisuke Miyazaki’s film Plastic (2023), fans of a fictitious ’70s glam-rock band try to track down their heroes.
Even the OG fictional rock gods of yore, Spinal Tap, are getting back together for a sequel to the beloved This Is Spinal Tap (1984). That reunion is more symptomatic of Hollywood’s voracious appetite for cannibalizing preexisting IP, but it does seem that Rob Reiner’s cult classic was ahead of its time. The 1984 movie satirized the heavy-metal hubris of its day so astutely that it made Spinal Tap a household name, as real to contemporary audiences as, say, Iron Maiden. (That the spoof rockers sporadically tour and play festivals only further blurs the line between real and fake.)
But what could M. Night Shyamalan, a man best known for audacious twists and diet-Hitchcock thrills, possibly have to say about pop music? As Trap unfolds, not a whole lot.
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024).
In the Hulu miniseries Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story (2024), Jon Bon Jovi recalls his vision for the “You Give Love a Bad Name” video, which captures the band rocking out in a sports arena, with ample shots of roaring fans and the singer’s heroic stage moves. “We knew that we had to be perceived as being an arena headliner,” Bon Jovi says. So, “we made a video that told you what we were like live.”
A similar kind of wish fulfillment animates Trap. Saleka Shyamalan, who released her debut album last year as Saleka, wanted to be perceived as an arena star, so her father made a movie where she is an arena star, her music worshiped and dissected by the masses. Set aside your feelings about the “nepo baby” trope and, you have to admit, that is a pretty impressive act of fatherly devotion from the dad who initially wrote Lady in the Water (2006) as a bedtime story for his kids. While movie-musicians are often played by actors who can sing, this one is a vehicle for the musical career of a singer who can (more or less) also act.
What’s less impressive is Trap’s effort to convince us that Lady Raven is a pop icon on par with Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. The film’s first half unfolds inside the fictional “Tanaka Arena,” where Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is taking his teen daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a sold-out concert by the supposed megastar. As it happens, the FBI has staked out this show in order to catch a serial killer known as “The Butcher,” whom they expect to be in attendance. What could have been a major twist is made obvious early on: Cooper is The Butcher. His daughter, of course, is blissfully unaware and entirely preoccupied with the show. The plot revolves around Cooper’s increasingly absurd scheme to evade capture.
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024).
Shyamalan apparently pitched Trap as “What if The Silence Of The Lambs [1991] happened at a Taylor Swift concert,” and the result is exactly as silly as that sounds. But the director, to his credit, doesn’t cheap out on staging an arena show. The camera captures Lady Raven’s choreography and backup dancers, and situates her performance against lavish, if not terribly imaginative, sets and production design. “It’s a full-fledged concert,” Shyamalan boasted.
Saleka’s onstage performance provides a diegetic soundtrack to the action; she wrote fourteen original songs for the character to perform in the film. They’re not bad—the skittering R&B of “Save Me” would kill on a Pilates playlist—but they’re not very distinctive, either. Saleka peddles a soulful but safe brand of mid-aughts pop, heavy on synthesized strings, which feels dated in a movie full of iPhones and TikTok-style dances. (The ballads, including “Where Did She Go,” which Lady Raven sings in that aforementioned living room, are worse—Stereogum editor Chris DeVille astutely compares them to “maudlin Christina Aguilera deep cuts.”)
Saleka is a talented stage performer, but she never really harnesses the stadium-sized charisma or screamable hooks that have propelled present-day pop icons to the top. Today’s pop stars are required to wield larger-than-life personalities to accompany their music—Taylor Swift as a superhuman chronicler of relationship drama and personal lore; Olivia Rodrigo as a pop-punk queen of break-up angst; Billie Eilish as an enigmatic avatar for weirdo goth loners. It’s never quite clear what distinguishes Lady Raven to her fans, “the Flock”—beyond being good at singing.
The Idea of You (Michael Showalter, 2024).
A similar vagueness plagues The Idea of You. The romantic comedy stars Anne Hathaway as Solène, a divorced 40-year-old mom who enters a whirlwind romance with a 24-year-old British pop star named Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), a member of the popular boy band August Moon. Solène takes her daughter to see the group perform at Coachella, where she has a meet-cute with Hayes, having wandered into his trailer by mistake. August Moon’s music is pleasant and inoffensive, like flavored water; it goes down easy, not unlike that of Harry Styles, on whom Hayes is rumored to have been based. (Novelist Robinne Lee has denied this, though Hayes—like Styles—is a charming Brit with earrings and tattoos and a taste for older women.)
Styles at least wears a dress every now and then, injecting some flamboyance into his otherwise beige, retro-pastiche music. Hayes Campbell has a doe-eyed void where a personality should be. He’s pretty, and seemingly a good kisser, but rarely does The Idea of You convince us that he’s the most interesting character in the room. Pop stars are notoriously messy and erratic and drama-prone, but this guy’s only real vice is…buying too much expensive art? (To woo Solène, he purchases the entire inventory of her gallery.) Hayes’s wholesomeness makes him seem as though he were written as a fantasy object more than a three-dimensional musician.
If Trap has a plot that strains credulity (how would the FBI catch a serial killer amid the chaos of an arena show? Operation Flagship this is not), The Idea of You suffers from the opposite problem. Its central relationship simply isn’t as wild or scandalous as the movie would have you believe. A significant plot point involves the tabloids discovering the clandestine relationship and sensationalizing Solène with terms like “Cougar” and “Yoko Ono 2.0,” which seems like a stretch. A twentysomething pop star attracted to a 40-year-old woman? Not that weird! Especially when the woman is Hathaway, who throughout The Idea of You is styled and made up like a glamorous movie star rather than an everyday mom.
The Idea of You (Michael Showalter, 2024).
The early Hayes-and-Solène scenes, when he flirts with her at Coachella and later during a surprise visit to her art gallery, bring some fizzy romantic tension, owing in large part to the novelty of their fish-out-of-water settings. But once their relationship kicks off in earnest, and he whisks her off to a European tour, the film’s trajectory feels as rote and preordained as an August Moon song. Of course, there’s a split-screen montage of their Euro-tour adventures; of course, there’s a fraught break-up scene where it all goes sour; of course, there’s an eventual reconciliation of sorts.
Like Lady Raven, Hayes Campbell winds up feeling more like an archetype, a cypher for other people’s fandom and desires, than a flesh-and-blood character. During Trap’s twisty third act, Lady Raven morphs into a quick-witted crime-fighter, exploiting her formidable stan army for good. She’s a little like a superhero. Hayes, in the words of Solène’s daughter, is “a talented, kind feminist”—a different kind of superhero.
The Idea of You is ultimately too wholesome for its own good. Its depiction of the music world is strangely sugarcoated and anodyne. More compelling are the horny, drug-addled, self-sabotaging stars of Daisy Jones & the Six, which chronicles a band’s turbulent rise in the ’70s rock scene. Cliché-filled as it is, the series at least revels in its rock ’n’ roll messiness, with bandmates—dead ringers for Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—tumbling into addiction, fraught love triangles, and onstage meltdowns. This makes for a more engaging portrait of stardom. And in this band’s case—as in Fleetwood Mac’s—it also results in more interesting music, an appealing facsimile of that era’s radio pop as rich in drama as in hooks.
The Idea of You (Michel Showalter, 2024).
The success of these particular projects (Trap has earned more than $82 million, capping off a Shyamalan comeback that began in 2021 with Old) marks a shift from a previous era when movies about fictional rock stars seemed to be box-office poison.
In 1998, Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine used the 1970s glam-rock scene as narrative fuel for a fictional, Bowie-inspired character study; the film divided critics and failed to connect with mainstream audiences. As with I’m Not There (2007), Haynes is more interested in the mythology surrounding a popular musician than the unknowable person underneath.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) lampoons biopic tropes from Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2005), telling the story of a dimwitted rock ’n’ roller who overcomes childhood trauma to achieve stardom before getting mired in drugs and Dylan-esque self-importance. Such sequences are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, with Dewey’s introduction to various drugs serving as a running gag, but audiences didn’t quite get the joke, and the movie performed so poorly at the box office as to ruin producer Judd Apatow’s vacation. In time, though, Walk Hard reemerged as a cult classic. The movie skewered the clichés of rise-and-fall biopics so adroitly that it is now often invoked by critics in reviews of newer films. Slate’s Dan Kois, for instance, wrote that he burst out laughing when Michael Mann’s Ferrari (2023) recycled a line from Walk Hard (“The wrong son died”) sans irony.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Jake Kasdan, 2007).
While Walk Hard parodies a calcified genre, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) moves that genre forward. Dispensing with the clichéd signifiers of success (the familiar tour montages, the decadent drug binges), it hews closer to a loser’s narrative. This mordantly funny character study from the Coen brothers understands what movies about popular music rarely acknowledge: that countless great musicians hustle and struggle and never make it big. (Dave Van Ronk, the film’s rumored inspiration, is one such example.)
Liberated from the imitative remit of “real” biopics, Oscar Isaac embodies the title character as a three-dimensional screw-up at the end of his rope; broke and drained, he squabbles with his ex and lashes out at the kindly couple who let him crash on their couch and yet can still perform folk traditionals with a stunning, earnest sweetness. Music is a wonderful thing, the film seems to suggest, but it won’t save you. The soundtrack, produced by T Bone Burnett, is a stellar homage to the early ’60s folk scene. Inside Llewyn Davis swathes its portrayal of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the Coens’ trademark cynicism and dark humor, and it delivers an ending punch line so potent that it basically rendered the looming Bob Dylan biopic redundant.
The Andy Samberg vehicle Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016), a mockumentary about a popular yet clueless white rapper, supplants Walk Hard’s classic-rock milieu with a more modern era of Top-40 stardom. The film’s well-crafted spoofs of contemporaneous pop self-owns, such as U2’s iTunes faceplant or Macklemore’s gay-rights anthem, give the satire teeth (I submit that “Equal Rights” may be Samberg’s finest moment). It may have bombed at the box office, but once again, it was destined for cult status.
Tár (Todd Field, 2022).
In more recent years, formulaic rock biopics have multiplied at an alarming rate. Against this tide, Todd Field’s astonishing Tár (2022) conjures the story of a classical music giant, the high-culture equivalent of a pop star. Starring Cate Blanchett as a world-renowned, EGOT-winning conductor whose career and reputation suddenly unravel, the film burrows deep into the troubled psyche that fame and power enable. Instead of filling in Lydia Tár’s backstory with childhood flashbacks and rise-to-fame sequences (the film conveys the latter more efficiently, with images of record sleeves and awards in her enviable apartment), Field leaves room for mystery and lets the viewer observe her behavior up close, in fraught interactions with her students, her wife, and a personal assistant. Gradually, and with room for ambiguity, a portrait of Lydia’s hubris and egomania begins to emerge.
Blanchett’s performance and Field’s attentiveness to detail (which includes a remarkably convincing interview between the titular character and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, playing himself) make Lydia Tár seem plausibly real—so real that some viewers walked away from the movie believing it was a biopic and attempting to do a Wikipedia deep dive on the fictional Tár. Can you blame viewers for being so accustomed to Oscar-bait biopics adapted from real-world IP?
After my first viewing of Trap, I didn’t think anyone could possibly mistake Lady Raven for a real-life pop star. The character seemed too thin. After my second—a rowdy, teen-filled screening at the AMC in Times Square—I wasn’t so sure. Shyamalan does have a gift for captivating theater audiences. In the men’s room, after the movie, I overheard one young moviegoer ask his friend, “So, is Lady Raven, like, a real singer or something?” That she is not may seem, for at least one viewer, like Shyamalan’s biggest twist yet.