The older I get, the more I’ve realized that my biggest role models growing up as a kid were Jesus Christ and Spongebob Squarepants. I think this is because both of these people are not real people. Well, historically that isn’t true for both, but let me explain.

SpongeBob is one of those classic characters that is pure of heart, but dumb of ass. He often manages to completely fuck up even the most simple tasks given to him, and his ignorance paired with his willingness to try anyway is often what leads to the hilarious scenarios we all love to see him in. But at the end of the day, no matter who he annoys, what he inadvertently destroys, or what chaos he causes, we never really hate him because his heart is forever in the right place.

Jesus Christ might have been a real person who once walked the earth, but that real life human man is not the person most of us learn about in church. I learned about a man with such a pure heart, such an unshakable belief in the divine, that he never once questioned the path of faith he traveled, even in the midst of the suffering that path would lead him to.

In the years since I’ve been an adult, I’ve recognized the parts of me that I took from those two mythical figures, but have understood for some time now that neither of them are actually real people. Spongebob is indeed purely the creation of Stephen Hillenburg, so of course he was never real. But the image of Christ I’ve known all my life could not possibly be the complete and total picture of the human man that was Jesus. Even if his actions were all the same as written in the Good Book, I can not imagine he never once had a spiteful impulse, never once felt the allure of temptation, or never felt jealousy or apathy toward anyone. If he truly walked among us as one of us, I must believe he shared our flaws, which, to me, is the only thing that makes his biblical actions impressive. Anyone can be perfect when you are designed specifically to be perfect, but to choose it day in and day out, in the face of every more immediate path of satisfaction, that is something I can find inspiring.

I didn’t only grow up with the humor of Spongebob and the word of God nourishing my soul, but the music of Michael Jackson as well. My mom was the one who played his music in our household day and night, but it wasn’t until his death in 2009 that I began to fall in love with his music on my own, without the influence of my mother. For those early years, I understood the towering shadow that MJ casted over all of pop culture, but it wasn’t until his death that I really understood that he was not only known by most, but he was loved deeply by almost as many. The day he died, my family was at a local mall shopping for summer clothes. Every black person we passed or interacted with had a variation of the same comment: “You heard what happened to Mike?”. I swear, it was like 9/11 to niggas, but instead of it striking fear in the hearts of a nation, it struck sorrow in the hearts of the entire world. I had never witnessed a celebrity death that seemed to affect people on a seemingly universal level like that, and that had me curious to see what kind of music could reach so many people in such a strong way. I listened to the posthumous album, Micheal, as soon as it was released. Then, I went back into his backlog with a new found appreciation. Now, after listening to his songs over 2,000 times since 2011 (I’ve been tracking on Last.FM, trust me) I can solidly say that Michael Jackson is one of my favorite musicians of all time.

So, if you are anything like me, or my mother, or so much of the music loving world, you will like Michael. It plays the hits, and goddamit does no one have hits like him. Seeing the humble origins of iconic songs like I’ll Be There and I Want You Back was a joy. Seeing incredibly accurate recreations of iconic Michael Jackson moments in history, like his first televised moonwalk or the filming of his Triller video, were all fun to see. And man is it a flex to have a movie all about your career stop only halfway into it, and still have more than enough hits to fill up the soundtrack left on the cutting room. If you only want to see Jaafar Jackson match Michael’s likeness with uncanny accuracy, and reminisce about how incredible of an artist and performer Michael was, then this will be everything you want it to be.

However, even as someone who grew up on his music, I can’t help but want more than that.

I said who my role models growing up were, and many who knew me as a kid would tell me that, in short…they could tell. If not for my two buck teeth that were much more prominent before I got braces, my goofy personality would make my love of SpongeBob obvious. As soon as I acquired enough $15 words to regularly use in my vocabulary, everyone would take that wellspokeness, combine it with my reputation as a good kid, and swear up and down that I had a promising future as a pastor. But once you get old enough, any mistake you make doesn’t get wiped away by the next episode, even if your heart is in the right place. Those mistakes are your fault, and you have to not only live with it, but if you ever hope to be better, you must learn from it. All the mistakes I’ve made, even the ones made when my heart was in the wrong place, are things that have replayed in my mind long enough that I try to live my life in a way that keeps me from adding to that pile. I will probalby fuck up again, but I think I only get to call myself a good person if I keep trying to get back on track when I do. I understand that being a good person is not something you just decide to do and then just let happen forever, but something that is maintained for a lifetime. But Michael, as portrayed in this film, seems to not have to do any of that maintenance.

Michael Jackson is God’s Perfect Idiot. I say that not because he is dumb of ass, but because he is portrayed as so pure of heart that he circles around to being infantilized by the script. He can never break a woman’s heart despite being the biggest heartthrob on earth, because all he does is watch movies with his mom and play with his pet monkey. When he’s not with his only friends, the many exotic animals he owns, he’s off reading fairytales and connecting with children half his age, often at children’s hospitals. He cannot stand up to his own, admittedly abusive, father one on one, so he relies on the public stage to cement his word as final. Even when he shows a bit of ambition to be the most successful artist of all time, it comes off not as him wishing to make a statement by leading the charts as a black man, but to simply lead because he is the greatest, period, race be damned. And on top of all that, you’re really telling me that a nigga that grew up in the birth place of fucking Freddie Gibbs didn’t know what gang violence was until he saw it on TV in California?

When I say Micheal, plays the hits, I do not mean only that it plays his classic songs. By this I also mean it plays out the parts of the Michael Jackson story that most of us know by heart. I know Joe Jackson wasn’t shit, and goddamn does Coleman Domingo play a no-good negro better than anyone living today. I know Michael has all those animals and put diapers on a whole ass ape. I know his hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial and it fucked him up for a while. I know he got his nose job due to shame he felt from his family. Even if I didn’t have vague memories of watching The Jacksons: An American Dream on TV, I would have known all of this because they were still frequent topics of televised conversation whenever Michael’s name came up, which was a lot growing up. Damn near everyone watching this knows these aspects of his story, but if I’m signing up to watch the life of a man who has been dead for 15 years now, I am hoping to see something as close to the truth as possible. Don’t tell me how perfect this man was when I have the intelligence to know he couldn’t possibly be that perfect. Show me his inner struggles, show me his flaws, show me the things he had to overcome in himself that make his incredible career something worth marveling at. This movie shows none of that, as, if the movie is to be believed, the only thing ever stopping Michael Jackson from being Michael Jackson was the very man that gave him that big ol’ nose he was so ashamed of.

I say all of that, but I am not surprised by this. There is no way this could be sold as anything that could put Michael in even a questionable light. This is effectively a farewell tour for an artist long gone. Several decades from now, if I went to go to, say, Kendrick’s farewell tour only to be made aware of his personal demons and faults for two hours, I don’t think I’d leave the theater happy, let alone ready to watch a sequel. But that just feeds back to the point. The final scene ends with the text “His Story Continues” on screen, and it just made me so aggressively aware how much this movie feels structured like a Marvel movie. Direct mentions from Michael about wanting to help sick kids are immediately followed by him longingly brushing his hand over a map of Neverland from Peter Pan. His vocal aversion to being given pain medication while the camera holds for an extra second on the morphine in his drip. So much of the movie hints towards future parts of his life that we know from history, but in the context of this movie, or now franchise, it feels like they are cynical breadcrumbs to lead audiences back into theaters for the sequel. In the same way a small scene with Thanos in it was designed to build towards Avengers Endgame, the final musical number of Bad is meant to hint towards the exploration of the era of that next album of the same name. For as much as this movie is art, as all movies are, teasers like these made me painfully aware that it is also a product.

As I walked out the theater, I heard a bit of gossip that might have given more context to decisions like these. I saw the film with nearly my whole family and some family friends, so as soon as I got to my mom, I asked: “When was Janet born again?”. That’s right, Janet Jackson, the only member of the Jackson family with anywhere near Michael’s fame, is nowhere to be found in the film. From what she and her friend told me (and I will not be confirming this, I am not a journalist), Janet didn’t want to be a part of this movie, as she was “one of the only people who actually supported Michael when he was still alive”. I understand that Jermaine, Tito, Jackie, Marlon, and La Toya Jackson were all executive producers on the film, but before I knew that, I knew the Jackson estate had their hands in the production of this movie from the get go. Because of this, I never expected them to touch on anything that would tarnish not only Micheal’s name, but the Jackson name. But Janet’s exclusion from the film has led me to wonder, is that because they want to protect the family name, or because they want to protect the image of a man who has continued to provide for them a decade and a half after death?

A little over a year ago, I randomly watched this movie called Paris, Texas. If you love Michael, you will likely not love this movie. It is incredibly slow and quiet, and you will not know what is going on in it until more than halfway through it. After seeing it, I didn’t walk away madly in love with it, but it stayed with me. Every few days or weeks, I think about moments from that movie, and it moves me. In fact, during the last 50% off sale at the Criterion Collection, I picked it up on Blu-Ray. I think I keep thinking about it because it is about a man who has done a terrible thing and ran away from the consequence of his actions only to eventually atone in a way that ultimately provides no catharsis to him at all. It’s kinda painful, but to me, powerful to watch. Now, I cannot say genuinely, that I have ever even thought of doing any of the terrible things he did in the story of that film. But there is indeed a part, or even parts, of me that feel deep regret and sadness for the harm I have done. There are parts of me that wish I could make those wrongs right in as grand a way as he did. No matter how many people may have a positive opinion of me, no matter how many people seem to think of me as comparable to a cartoon sea sponge or an embodiment of the word of God, I know the truth, that I can never live up to those icons. But to be human is to try anyway, and I hope to never stop doing so.

Michael Jackson, as portrayed in the movie Michael, is not a human. He is only an icon. At my big age, I find it nearly impossible to be inspired by, or even artistically compelled, by an Icon. But I’ll be damned if I don’t still shed a tear when that Icon sings Human Nature, even if it is through the performance of his nephew.