Telling lives

From the epic, sprawling battles of "Alexander" to the smaller but truer skirmishes of the heart in "Kinsey," from the treacle of "Finding Neverland" to the syrupy fizz of "Ray," we're having a biopic moment.

Real people, real lives, real stories, translated with greater or lesser fidelity to the big screen -- they're everywhere, and there are more coming. Next month we'll see "The Aviator," with Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, and "Beyond the Sea," with Bobby Darin as channeled by Kevin Spacey; we've got Johnny and June Cash portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (!) after that, and treatments of everyone from Janis Joplin to Robert Burns in the works. Just why are there so many biographies on the big screen right now?

The first thing to say about this trend is that it isn't a trend. It's a coincidence. Some of these projects have been simmering for decades, while others got made as soon as they got funded; some are a director's lifelong dream, others just the next gig that happened to come along. Their simultaneous appearance in theaters is the result of mere chance.

But the next thing to say is that it's interesting anyway. It's interesting because the challenges of turning life into narrative are many and complex. And the current crop of biographical films, randomly generated though it is, shows by its very diversity just how many different ways there are to meet those challenges.

Oliver Stone, for instance, takes the personal-angst-set-against-sweeping-historical-backdrop approach, so "Alexander," which opens here Wednesday, gives us a blond Colin Farrell as both mythic general and tormented lover. Taylor Hackford's "Ray" locks Jamie Foxx's riveting performance into a deeply conventional format: Hero suffers, discovers his gifts, discovers his flaws, emerges wounded but essentially triumphant. Bill Condon's "Kinsey" tweaks these conventions in smart and subtle ways, at once feeding us the biopic staples and reminding us that we're being fed; Irwin Winkler's underrated "De-Lovely," released in July, also found ways to break through the fourth wall of the screen, telling a multilayered story while reminding us that it's a story, and that someone's telling it.

"Biopics never go away, really, because a biography is a believable story, and people who go to movies want a believable story," says Jeanine Basinger, who chairs the film-studies department at Wesleyan University. "It seems that screenwriters are having trouble coming up with stories that are new and different, and life stories are unique."

Indeed they are, and that's part of their charm. As people who have been watching movies all our lives, we know only too well how they go. We see fictional plot twists coming a mile off; we can tell by the lighting in the first scene -- heck, by the typeface of the opening credits -- whether we're likely to get a happy ending. Actual lives, though, are messy and unpredictable. In the story of a life, anything can happen, and we have to believe it because it really did happen.

That makes for interesting surprises -- although, granted, the more famous the subject is, the more likely we are already to know about the big twists in his life. (In film as in politics, alas, the lives we mostly hear about are still "his," not "hers.") And, of course, we know how every life ends. But the fact of facts -- the need to stay more or less true-to-life that this genre imposes -- makes filmmakers at once more powerful and more constrained.

"There's freedom and limitation," says Condon, who was in Boston last month to talk about his film. "Yes, it happened -- that's the freedom -- but you can't stray too far from the facts."

It's that paradox, Condon says, that keeps drawing him to a genre that he professes not to like very much.

"Every time I think I'm going to take a break, you read people's lives and they're so fascinating," Condon says. "Every time I say, 'No more' -- these true stories allow you to do more than you could do in fiction."

But film biography also has its pitfalls -- some owing to the nature of film, some to the nature of biography, and some to the occasionally bad chemistry between the two. Real lives tend not to have a neat, pleasingly shaped structure; they often start off with dull familiarity, have some exciting bits scattered in the middle, then tail off whimperingly into the night. Film, on the other hand, can seem all too structured, with a rigid adherence to dramatic convention that puts every crisis precisely in its appointed place. And if you get the mix wrong, you get a mess.

Robin Lane Fox, the Oxford historian who advised Stone on the life of Alexander the Great, draws the lines clearly in a recorded interview provided by Warner Bros. "Whereas my life as a historian values above all two goods, evidence and scholarship, the filmmaker has a different pair, entertainment and structure -- a different E and an S," Fox says. "The two will meet sometimes, but this is a film; it's not a documentary history."

In Alexander's case, as Fox explains, there's no choice but to make a lot of it up. "We have no surviving evidence of Alexander's dialogue; we hardly know words ascribed to him," Fox says. "Film depends on dialogue. So fiction has to come into it straightaway."

It may seem as if more recent lives would call for less invention, and of course we do have more documentary evidence on subjects whose times are closer to our own. Nevertheless, there are always gaps in what we can know about any other human being, and so filmmakers must always find their own ways to fill in those holes.

More significantly, they must find their own meanings in the lives they to show. Bybringing a life to the screen, a filmmaker is saying that that life is worth attending to; the question is why.

"The point becomes: Can you use a life story to make a cultural point?" Basinger says. " 'Ray' -- OK, it could be about race relations. 'Alexander,' it could be about war. 'Kinsey,' the ever-popular sex. Why 'Finding Neverland'? Who knows?"

As much as she's puzzled by "Finding Neverland," which gives us Johnny Depp in fey fettle in the story of J.M. Barrie and the boys who inspired his "Peter Pan," Basinger finds herself wondering about whether we really need "Beyond the Sea." "People have realized that the biography channel is hugely popular on television," she says. "The question is these popular biographies. Why are we making a biography about Bobby Darin?"

Again, who knows? It's not here yet, so we don't know if Spacey has plumbed hitherto unknown depths in the man who crooned "Mack the Knife." And, as Basinger notes, an unlikely subject can still make a successful film. "Who would have thought that Kinsey would make a movie?" she says. "But then it becomes a story about something unusual."

In fact, it's precisely the unusual elements of Kinsey's story -- and, just as important, of Condon's telling of it -- that make it a film worth watching. A less crafty director and screenwriter might have skipped over Kinsey's early years as a biologist obsessed with gall wasps to get straight to the naughty bits. But Condon knows, and demonstrates, that it is our obsessions that make us who we are -- and that, because everyone is weird in some way, even the weirdest weirdness is, paradoxically, universal.

And so we see Liam Neeson's Kinsey pinning gall wasps to cards, labeling them, cataloging them, and waxing rhapsodic about them in a way that gently reinforces Condon's central theme.

"There are 4 million gall wasps, and none are alike," Condon explains. "Nobody's sexuality is the same as everyone else's. Everybody's different, but still everybody wants to be part of the group. And the idea of respecting our individuality is still important."

Maybe that's why we watch these movies: to see the quirks of our fellow creatures, and to remind us that we are all both fundamentally quirky and fundamentally alike. We need the facts, the individual and irreplaceable facts of a person's life, but we also need the story, the narrative line that shows us that life's meaning. When we get both -- fact and story, history and fiction, event and narrative -- we get the best kind of true story. We get something that is true to one unique life but also truly a universal story: a shared narrative that leads us to think about the unfolding mystery and meaning of every life, including our own.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.