Girl, you know the story of Milli Vanilli, the manufactured ‘90s pop duo infamously caught with someone else’s voice boxes in the cookie jar. Theirs is an oft-told tale of music industry exploitation, sex and drugs and new jack swing. Writer-director Simon Verhoeven takes on this decade-defining scandal in Girl You Know It’s True. The arc of the much-vilified would-be-Grammy winners has some cooked-in ideas about authenticity and manufactured entertainment. But despite a mostly engaging cast, the filmmakers can’t find enough drama for a two-hour biopic.
The musical drama is not without promise. The plot is framed by Rob (Tijan Njie) and Fab (Elan Ben Ali), reveling in the aftermath of new jack groupies in a swinging Top 40 bachelor pad. How did they accomplish their ill-gotten gains? Rob’s story is the more loaded: adopted by white German parents, in his recollection it was clear at an early age that mom and dad adopted a black kid for reasons that weren’t entirely noble: when Rob’s parents invite friends to meet their new adopted son, the neighbors pet the boy’s afro with an air of condescension.
A sharper screenplay would have mirrored this moment with the adult Rob having his signature dreads petted by a drooling fan, but Verhoeven isn’t so smart. Part of the problem is he tries to squeeze too much into the narrative. A crucial part of the Milli Vanilli story is that of German music producer Frank Farian (Matthias Schweighöfer), who took the anonymous musicians of Boney M., threw them a reggae staple to cover (“Rivers of Babylon”) and got a huge hit out if it in every major market except the United States (whose residents, for once, showed some taste). Farian wanted a hit in America, so why not take these dreadlocked Munich club-hoppers and feed them through the pop sausage machine?
Sounds like a recipe for cheesy fun, huh? Nije and Ali are likeable, even when their shot at superstardom turns them into brats. And Schweighöfer makes a vivid villain, his makeup team somehow generating the right amount of hair product to give those Teutonic locks a consistently stringy appearance.
But Verhoeven’s script skips around the Vanilli timeline too wildly, so much so that when the inevitable conflicts arise—the lip-sync concert fiasco, the reappearance of Rob’s birth father—such dramatic highlights aren’t meted out judiciously enough to create a juicy behind-the-scenes structure.
Girl You Know It’s True is not nearly as fun as it should be, but there are enough howlers in the script to provide some camp comfort. One Arista exec shouts out, “My fax machine is burning like a rocket!” In one climactic exchange, Rob complains to Frank, “We’re number one in the US,” to which Frank shouts, “No – we’re not number one. ROXETTE is number one!”
Aptly, this passion play about inauthentic pop stars turns even more inauthentic when it tries to follow the original performers of “Girl You Know It’s True” in a Baltimore that looks absolutely nothing like Baltimore. One wishes a Todd Haynes got a hold of this story and really explored the levels of surface and exploitation at work here—there would have been plenty to work with.
There is a very human element in Girl You Know It’s True, with plenty of pride to go beforeth a fall, as well as an amusing sushi leitmotif that perhaps takes the place of the afro mirroring that’s foreshadowed but never resolved. Girl, you know it’s a lie; if only it were a lie told with more flair.
Photo courtesy of Vertical
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