Let’s start with the elephant that’s not in the room. The new bio-pic “Michael” includes no mention that its protagonist, the late pop star Michael Jackson, faced multiple accusations of child sexual abuse. The allegations (which Jackson denied) were addressed in an earlier cut of the film, as the director, Antoine Fuqua, told Kelefa Sanneh for a recent profile in this magazine. But the relevant scenes were reportedly removed at the insistence of Jackson’s estate (which also paid for related reshoots), on the grounds that its settlement with an accuser prohibited it from depicting or mentioning him. This dismaying course of events reflects a major problem with bio-pics: that the involvement of interested parties—whether the subjects themselves, their families, or other rights holders—risks distorting a life story by sanitizing it, leaving out events that would make the subject look bad. This dilemma is even more pronounced for bio-pics of musicians, which depend upon rights holders granting use of the subject’s music. (The Jackson estate has been aggressive about shielding the artist’s reputation, even suing HBO in 2019 over a documentary, “Leaving Neverland,” centered on two of his alleged victims; the film has since been yanked from the platform.)

When it comes to a story as well known as Jackson’s, the sanitizing hardly seems worth it, because the absence of the accusations is as conspicuous as their presence would have been. Setting aside the woeful omission, though, and considering the film outside the realm of preëxisting facts, as if it were a work of fiction about a fictitious character, “Michael” still counts as only a modestly noteworthy achievement, enjoyable yet flawed—because it contains other, artistic blind spots that keep the drama thin and narrow. The film’s perspective on its protagonist (I’ll call him Michael, to distinguish him from the historical Jackson) is unusual and engaging, especially by comparison with another new movie about a pop star with personal demons, David Lowery’s “Mother Mary,” which treats stardom as a given and reduces career obstacles to metaphysical neuroses. “Michael,” by contrast, explores the practicalities by which an artist’s raw talent is refined, a group of local performers reaches the big spotlight, and famous figures are transformed into global phenomena. The movie offers catchy narrative anecdotes that form a coherent and poignant portrait, but it fails to fill out its themes with much insight into the artistic consciousness.

The story starts one evening in 1966, in the living room of the Jackson family, in their home town of Gary, Indiana. There, the patriarch, Joseph (Colman Domingo), presses the child Michael (played with admirable musical and dramatic flair by Juliano Valdi) and four of Michael’s older brothers into rehearsal. Joseph—that’s how his children address him—is a steel-mill worker, and he exerts authoritarian power over the kids in the hope of making them successful performers and thus freeing them from the world of manual labor in which he’s stuck. At first, he commands them with a mere tone of menace. Then one night, after the group returns home late from a local gig, he demands that they rehearse; when his wife and the kids’ mother, Katherine (Nia Long), says that Michael is too tired, Joseph beats him with a belt. The act of physical brutality also serves as a warning to Katherine that she can’t protect the children from him.

In bed afterward, recovering from his father’s assault, Michael reads an illustrated Peter Pan book in which a drawing of the villainous Captain Hook is hand-labelled “Joseph”—a blatant foreshadowing of Michael’s refuge in a fantasy version of childhood. Soon, his real childhood is overtaken by his career, when Joseph pulls the group—now called the Jackson Five—out of school for a Chicago gig. The group is a hit with the audience, and, in the wings, an executive for Motown Records, Suzanne de Passe (Laura Harrier), slips Joseph her card. With planted irony, she praises Michael’s “God-given talent,” as Joseph’s hint of a sneer suggests that he’s claiming credit for it. (Domingo’s performance, which seethes with a ferociously warped sense of purpose, is far subtler and more varied than the script’s rhetorically heated but underdeveloped character.) The movie doesn’t take its time: cut to Los Angeles, where the Jackson Five is recording for Motown, under the guidance of its founder, Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate). Gordy coaches Michael through the vocals of “I Want You Back” and, in the process, initiates him in the technical art of making records. He also offers a form of mentorship altogether different from Joseph’s reign of terror.

As the lead singer and the prime personality of the Jackson Five, Michael is propelled into stardom and the compromises that come with it, starting when Gordy advises him to lie about his age. One compromise that weighs heavily on him is the fact that he has no friends, and the depiction of him as an isolated, idiosyncratic young adolescent stokes pathos simply and plainly. To fill his solitude, he buys animals (a snake, a rat, a llama; eventually, a chimpanzee and even a giraffe). Human peers, he laments, only gawk at him and want a photo. Katherine, his companion in nighttime TV-movie viewing (“Singin’ in the Rain,” the Three Stooges), says that she always knew that he was different, and she exhorts him to embrace his difference: “Let your light shine,” she tells him. And so he does—in scenes set seven years later, in 1978, when Michael, now an adult played by Jackson’s real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson, goes behind Joseph’s back to pursue a solo career. (The group had, by then, moved to Epic Records, a division of Columbia.)

As the grownup Michael asserts himself artistically and professionally, the drama becomes pugnacious, with Fuqua and the screenwriter John Logan filling in fine-grained details of business maneuvers whose glaring ironies are pierced with pain. Michael, while working on his first solo album with Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson), can’t bring himself to tell his father; when Joseph is nonetheless informed, he responds with a power play of his own. To wriggle out of Joseph’s grasp, Michael hires a brash young lawyer, John Branca, played by Miles Teller, who lends the coolly confident character a delightfully rough edge. (The real-life Branca, who was also Jackson’s business adviser, is an executor of Jackson’s estate and a producer of the movie.) Thus ably abetted, Michael insists that the record company’s head, Walter Yetnikoff (Mike Myers, bringing outrageous yet principled streetwise humor), force MTV—considered then to be denying Black artists airtime—to broadcast the music video of “Billie Jean,” a key step toward making it a worldwide hit.

With this plethora of behind-the-scenes incidents, “Michael” becomes a vigorously effective business movie. Unfortunately, it’s far less detailed or effective in its portrayal of the title character, and the trouble starts with the script, which omits many matters of incontrovertible interest even beyond the allegations of child abuse. For starters, there’s nothing of the eternal triangle of sex, politics, and money. The story is filled with dealmaking, but just how rich the Jackson family, and Michael himself, get from their success goes unspoken, unsuggested—except that it’s plenty. As for politics, a TV report about gang violence inspires Michael to head into Los Angeles (accompanied by his bodyguard and driver, Bill Bray, played by KeiLyn Durrel Jones) to meet some streetwise young people in the hope of using dance to bring peace, but his awareness of the world seems to go no further. Sex, meanwhile, is simply not a part of Michael’s life in any way, nor is its absence acknowledged—is he naïve, shy, asexual, repressed? Even Michael’s social life is left blank, far beyond his adolescent solitudes. Young Michael may have seemed strange, or just plain different, to kids his own age, but what about the adult Michael, whose professional life took him outside the family orbit and into offices, studios, and night clubs? Did he never meet and talk with other stars? And what do stars discuss, anyway? Fuqua and Logan can’t be bothered to figure it out.

The film does show the adult Michael seeking connection with children. He spends time visiting sick kids at a local hospital. With his full shopping cart on a toy store’s checkout line, he gets into conversations with child customers and gives enthusiastic pointers to one on a video game. Michael arrives home from the store gleefully bearing the game Twister, and implores his brothers to play it with him (but he ends up playing it with his chimp instead). Though Michael’s bond with children is depicted as unfailingly innocent, these scenes all but shriek to be watched between the lines.

As Michael becomes a world champ of sales and celebrity, of adoration and admiration, he lives in increasing isolation, struggling to both acknowledge and avoid the crowds that form to catch a glimpse wherever he goes. In depicting Michael as an emotionally stunted and grievously wounded artist of historic greatness, the film outdoes other recent bio-pics, such as James Mangold’s aw-shucks early-Dylan portrait “A Complete Unknown” and Baz Luhrmann’s self-bedazzled “Elvis.” As Michael, Jaafar Jackson’s speaking voice is expressive, and his presence blends strength and fragility, power and vulnerability, even if, in dramatic scenes, the character is granted too little substance for there to be a self to express. In musical scenes, however, Jaafar delivers singing and dancing that is startlingly persuasive, passing through impersonation into something like channelling. Michael’s greatest joy, his prime state, is performing, no matter whether it’s done on his own terms or his father’s. Onstage, Michael is exalted, transfigured, fully alive, with neither fear nor shame. The movie carries him to 1988 and ends with a title card reading “His story continues.” No kidding. ♦