Mother Mary Joins Hollywood's Failed Pop Star Movies
SkimNews Take
The structured, multi-stakeholder process of filmmaking inherently conflicts with the spontaneous, individualistic essence of pop stardom, making authentic cinematic portrayal difficult.
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- A24's Mother Mary stars Anne Hathaway as a world-famous pop diva in a spiritual and sartorial crisis, with original music composed by FKA twigs, Charli xcx, and producer Jack Antonoff, and visual and biographical signifiers drawn from Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, and Lady Gaga — including a nod to Gaga's split with creative director Laurieann Gibson.
- The review argues the film is 'surprisingly weightless' despite its reverent approach, blaming both director Lowery's 'portentous psychobabble' writing and what the author calls a 'nagging paradox': pop's cultural power is everywhere, yet almost nowhere convincingly on screen.
- Anne Hathaway appeared on the New York Times' Popcast to discuss studying pop music 'like an academic' in preparation for the role.
- The author places Mother Mary in a pattern of failed fictional pop star projects — Amazon's Daisy Jones & The Six fizzled despite major star wattage, and Charli xcx's satirical mockumentary The Moment was 'listless' — while real-star biopics (A Star Is Born, Michael, Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere) continue to succeed.
- Films that used fictional pop music as backdrop rather than thematic engine fared better: M. Night Shyamalan's Trap and Smile 2 leaned into deliberate mediocrity, and HBO's The Idol produced 'World Class Sinner / I'm A Freak,' which the author calls the best fictional pop song in recent memory — 'dumb, campy, demonic and desperately catchy.'
- Vox Lux (2018), with Natalie Portman as a school shooting survivor turned star whose music is 'violence metabolized into earworms,' is named the most ambitious and divisive fictional pop star film in recent memory, though the author notes its music is 'too disdaining of actual pop to take seriously.'
- The central thesis: real star quality 'definitionally cannot be created, only trained,' making the 'reverse alchemy' of inventing a generational pop icon for film a near-impossible task — and the reviewer's preference for The Idea of You's August Moon is offered as evidence that even pastiche pop often outshines prestige attempts.
Why it matters: For A24 and any studio betting prestige talent on fictional pop star vehicles, the reviewer's verdict is a warning: stacking real stars (Hathaway, Michaela Coel), real songwriters (twigs, Charli xcx, Antonoff), and real iconography (Swift, Gaga, Beyoncé) still produced a film the critic calls 'untethered from the real humiliations of modern celebrity.' The track record the piece lays out — Daisy Jones fizzling, The Moment listless, Mother Mary weightless — suggests the problem isn't effort or reverence but a structural one: audiences feel the difference between borrowed and banked stardom, which is why biopics and films using pop as mere backdrop keep winning.
