Sfar rescues Gainsbourg from hipsters' self-satisfied claims.

"The film is at its best when its mythologizing is carnal and infused with cabaret, and not making the inflated claim of its title." - Bill Weber

A sex driven biopic of a master of French Pop music and more. The film may leave out less attractive moments in his life (his violent alcoholism is seem but almost justified by his work), but what remains is a highly creative and interesting portrait of an artist, unlike anything you will have seen recently.

Better-than average biopic; the magical realism and the cooperation & conflict between Gainsbourg & his alter ego were interesting -- not just a hackish signifier of a "tortured artist" (see: Oliver Stone, "The Doors"). Still feels a touch too constrained by narrative, and like most biopics I don't have any burning urge to see it again.

The fact that some sequences are so abrupt and anecdotal brings a certain freshness, but it also means a few of them just fall flat.

Never really gets to the inside, but for the first hour avoids biopic fatigue through magic realism. With fame the sun sets.

I was kind of put off at first by the fact it doesn't work like a traditional biopic - it's not a life story so much as a few glimpses, and there's not really that much about the composition of the music - Melody Nelson gets, like, nothing, and they talk about the controversy Je t'aime will cause but then never mention it again. Still, the performances were excellent, the new arrangements were nice, and I really enjoyed the stylistic bits. Definitely worthy of Gainsbourg.

His life story is for many too known, in the sense that he lived most of his adult life in public - so it felt refreshing to see a biopic that didn't really have a narrative flow and only consisted of a few glimps of what his life perhaps was like. Being what he was, Half baudelaire - half Aznavour, it feels and reads like a poetic Musical, wich really is soothing for this particular music-biopic. And the way they visualized Gainsbarre is genius.

Feels drawn out, not only because of its unneccesary long running time but also because there's nothing really there in terms of narrative. For hardcore fans only, and I'm not even sure they'll like this snooze-fest.

The ranking is only for the movie though, his music gets a solid A, especially the album Histoire de Melody Nelson. Go listen to it if you haven't done so.