Questlove went into Michael ready to pick it apart. Instead, he left convinced Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic had pulled off something far more difficult than getting the costumes, songs, and dance moves right.
In an Instagram post shared April 20, the Roots drummer and Oscar-winning filmmaker said the movie succeeds because it stops treating Michael Jackson like an untouchable myth and starts treating him like a person.
“For the first time, we aren’t looking at ‘THE KING’—we’re looking at a human being,” Questlove wrote. “It’s a side of him a lot of us seemed to forget after 1984.”
Questlove admitted he entered the screening with the mindset of a superfan, keeping track of every historical detail that seemed slightly off. “Wrong year,” he remembered thinking. “Song wasn’t out yet.” “He didn’t wear that jacket until…” But somewhere along the way, he stopped caring about the small stuff.
“I eventually put my weapons down,” he wrote. “Because they captured the SOUL of it all & gave him back his humanity.”
Michael has been under a microscope for months. The film, directed by Antoine Fuqua, follows Jackson from his Jackson 5 years through the Bad era and arrives in theaters April 24 after multiple delays, reshoots, and months of debate about how the singer’s story should be told.
Fuqua has said from the beginning that he was less interested in building a greatest-hits montage than in showing the person behind the legend. The director spent more than two years making the film and has described Jackson as an artist who changed not just music, but the culture around it.
“Michael just transcends any artist I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Fuqua said earlier this month. He added that Jackson’s refusal to be boxed in inspired him as a young director trying to break beyond music videos and into film.
The movie’s cast has echoed that same idea. Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s nephew, said he did not want to simply imitate his uncle’s voice and dance moves. Instead, he focused on what he called Michael’s “true essence.”
Questlove said that is exactly what makes the film land. “If this is the final word on his legacy,” he wrote, “showing his humanity was more important to me than any technical faux pas.”
He even suggested the movie could have an impact beyond Michael Jackson fans, comparing its potential to the impact Thriller had on pop music in 1982. “This film might do for the movie business what Thriller did for records,” Questlove wrote.
By the end of the post, the verdict was clear: one viewing was not enough.
“I’m going back to see it again,” Questlove wrote. “And again.”
