Living legends are hard to cast.

Portraying a living musical icon on film is a tightrope walk of talent versus recognition.

The recent Bob Dylan biopic with Timothée Chalamet is a case in point. Chalamet is undeniably a star.But his polished charisma couldn’t replicate Dylan’s raw, off-kilter energy in A Complete Unknown.

The result was a film that felt more like a glossy homage than a plunge into Dylan’s unique version of “bad.”

That mismatch highlights a central challenge: Do you cast for fame, or do you cast for feel?

Now, with the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere on the horizon, the question returns.

Jeremy Allen White, best known from The Bear, will play The Boss.

It’s a casting that prioritizes familiarity over mimicry. White might channel Springsteen’s working-class grit. But will he sound like him? Will it matter?

Sometimes, casting goes awry. Publicly.

Take 1989’s Great Balls of Fire! with Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis. It had all the ingredients: name actor, colorful subject, wild material. But the film barely cracked $13.7 million at the U.S. box officeholds and holds a 53% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. And that was with Lewis alive to see and promote it.

It underscores the risk of making films about living legends.

Audiences are not just watching. They’re judging.

Walk the Line, on the other hand, got it right.

The Johnny Cash biopic included early involvement from June Carter Cash. She passed before filming began, but her voice shaped the story. It helped the movie resonate beyond country music fans and won Reese Witherspoon an Oscar.

More importantly, it felt like them.

That’s the key: resonance.

You don’t need a soundalike or lookalike. You need a soul match.

If the legend’s still alive, the film had better be, too.

John Candy finally gets the movie he deserves.

The new documentary I Like Me doesn’t reflect a career so much as it resurrects a soul. Directed by Colin Hanks, it opens like a letter you forgot you wrote to yourself. Each frame comes dusted with warmth, from grainy SCTV clips to home footage that feels like laughter and Canadian winter.

Candy never looked like Hollywood, which made him perfect for it. He came at comedy from the inside out, not to impress but to include.

Watching him again reminds you of a time when humor had weight. When it came from kindness, not cruelty. When it carried the warmth of someone who knew what it meant to be overlooked and decided to pull everyone into the shot.

Hanks builds the story patiently. He stitches together family interviews, late-night appearances, and the kind of on-set scraps that say more than the sound bites.

You see Candy coaching young actors between takes. You see him fidget when praised. You see him look down, laugh, and change the subject. He wasn’t just funny. He was generous.

I Like Me It echoes a line from Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the 1987 gem that gave Candy his most human role. “I like me,” he says, through tears. “My wife likes me.”

In the documentary, the phrase becomes a wish fulfilled. The people around him liked him. Loved him. Still do.

Steve Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, and Dan Aykroyd all appear, but they don’t steal the focus. They orbit him. They talk about a man who never lost his politeness, even when fame tried to sand it off.

Martin recalls how Candy would apologize for taking too much food at craft services. O’Hara remembers him slipping her his per diem when she was broke. These are the kinds of stories that don’t headline an obituary, but define a person.

Hanks resists the easy route of canonizing Candy. The film doesn’t flinch from his excess, his weight, his exhaustion.

But it refuses to frame them as failure. They become part of the portrait: a body carrying more heart than it could bear. When Candy died in 1994, at just 43, it felt like the air went out of the room. I Like Me fills it again.

Yet for all the brilliance of Hanks’ direction, it’s Candy’s humanity that steals the picture one last time.

He reminds us that kindness plays longer than punchlines, that laughter without venom never ages, that decency can be an art form.

Finally, John Candy gets to take the bow he earned.