Selena Gomez Now Holds My Happiness In Her Hands
Selena Gomez has achieved a lot in her career.
I haven’t experienced most of it, but I’m told she’s quite good. (I do know for a fact that she’s great on the five-star bangers ‘Calm Down’ and ‘Ice Cream’.)
But she has signed up for what is perhaps the most important project that she, or pretty much anyone else in the history of projects, has ever embarked upon: the Linda Ronstadt biopic. And according to reports, she isn’t just an extra or something. She’s actually playing Linda Ronstadt.
So why are the stakes so high? Because Linda Ronstadt is one of my favourite singers. Also, the music biopic is perhaps the most dreaded of pics. The best ones — Amadeus, What’s Love Got to Do With It, Straight Outta Compton, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Control — tell the life story of their subjects in interesting ways, organically dramatising career highs and lows. The bad ones are absolutely excruciating, sending you on a groan-filled, by-the-numbers journey that will lead you to wonder why we ever need to know anything about a musician’s life.
In between, there are biopics that stick to the now very-tired formula but weave incredibly music in to keep you invested. It’s cheating, but it works. Bohemian Rhapsody, for example, is not a great movie. It didn’t really say anything interesting about who Freddie Mercury and Queen were and where they’re music came from. But there are lots of scenes where they’re in the studio, having what feels like the same argument over and over again (“You need to slow down, Fred!” / “Queen is whatever I say it is!”), but the bass player starts that riff and I got chills, because that riff turns into ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. Of course, the fighting stops ‘cause everyone likes it and the rest? Well, the rest… is history.
The upcoming Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, if the trailer is anything to go by, looks like it’s going to hit some familiar beats — the unlikely success story plus lines of dialogue that don’t sound like they came from a real person (“You gotta remember, I ain’t no Spice Girl”.) Yet the whole thing is made haunting by a truly great song.
Same for Bob Marley: One Love. In the trailer, he literally says to his kids, “Don’t worry about a thing because every little thing going to be alright.” Then he pauses so we can watch him think, “Hey, that would make a great song.” Even if that’s how it really happened, in 2024, that’s preposterous. Still. Incredible song. Sign me up.
This is the creative high-wire Selena Gomez is about to step on. Normally, I would tip my hat (I don’t wear a hat) and say, “Good luck to all involved” and go about my business, but Ronstadt’s music is so good, so powerful, that I am now extremely excited but also incredibly nervous.
Ronstadt was huge in the ‘70s and ‘80s. She sold a lot of albums and sang across multiple genres. There’s a great documentary, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, you can watch for free right here if you want to understand why she was such a big deal.
For me, the best stuff is the folk and country songs. That’s where the strength of her incredibly unique voice really comes through. It can be tender and sweet and then put you in a headlock and throw you into the sun.
Her covers — like ‘Willin’’, ‘I Still Miss Someone’, ‘Tumbling Dice’ — are absolutely legendary and often better than the original. Her version of Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ will put you in a sleeperhold of sorrow, roll you up into a ball of regret, then throw you right into the sun.
And her Spanish is gorgeous (she’s got Mexican heritage). On songs like ‘Por un Amor’, she lends a passionate longing, a desperation to her voice that will tie your heart to a wagon of pain and drag it around for hours before launching it right into the sun.
In anyone else’s hands, the ’80s stuff could easily have been dismissable cheeseball nonsense, but ‘Don’t Know Much’ with Aaron Neville, right before it hurls you into the sun, will juggle you like an orange at a circus of passionate sweetness. Seriously, the video is something to behold — just Ronstadt and Neville singing right in each other’s faces between shots of some sort of backyard horseplay.
So as long as the producers pick the right songs, this movie is going to have the potential to, if nothing else, fling us all into the sun.
And we know how effective one of her songs can be on a narrative. The third episode of The Last of Us was incredibly moving, in no small part because of the devastating presence of ‘Long Long Time’. Frank (Murray Bartlett) and Bill (Nick Offerman) play it on the piano at the beginning — and Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) play it in the car at the end to crushing effect. The episode (and show) are pretty decent. Set to Linda Ronstadt music? It’s otherworldly. As in, it will blast you off this world, into space, and you’ll end up, most likely, in the MFin sun.
Realistically, all Selena Gomez needs to do is pretend to have a few struggles and then sing this song and I’ll be checking myself into an institution for emotional overwhelmment. But what the project deserves is to be a great, great movie. I hope, for all our sakes, especially mine, that they pull it off.
Nick Bhasin is the Managing Editor of Junkee. His debut novel, I Look Forward to Hearing from You, published by Penguin Random House Australia, is out now. Follow him on Instagram or Twitter (he’s not calling it X).
Image: Getty