Every biographical movie streaming on MGM+ in the US right now — 30 films ranked by rating, checked against MGM+’s live catalog.
Updated September 2026 · Availability refreshed from MGM+ US
Directed by Martin Scorsese
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBlack-and-white cinematography mirrors LaMotta's fractured psyche, while the ring becomes both literal and metaphorical battleground for self-destruction.
The life of boxer Jake LaMotta, whose violence and temper that led him to the top in the ring destroyed his life outside of it.
Directed by Stanley Kramer
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCourtroom drama transforms historical trial into urgent contemporary debate, making biographical specifics irrelevant to the moral argument itself.
Schoolteacher Bertram Cates is arrested for teaching his students Darwin's theory of evolution. The case receives national attention and one of the newspaper reporters, E.K. Hornbeck, arranges to bring in renowned defense attorney and atheist Henry Drummond to defend Cates. The prosecutor, Matthew Brady is a former presidential candidate, famous evangelist, and old adversary of Drummond.
Directed by Arthur Penn
✦ MovieMuse AI takeThe breakthrough-moment structure—Anne Sullivan's patience crystallized in one transformative scene—became cinema's template for depicting invisible psychological transformation.
The true story of the frightening, lonely world of silence and darkness of 7-year-old Helen Keller who, since infancy, has never seen the sky, heard her mother's voice or expressed her innermost feelings. Then Annie Sullivan, a 20-year-old teacher from Boston, arrives. Having just recently regained her own sight, the no-nonsense Annie reaches out to Helen through the power of touch, the only tool they have in common, and leads her bold pupil on a miraculous journey from fear and isolation to happiness and light.
Directed by F. Gary Gray
✦ MovieMuse AI takeEnsemble structure refuses singular protagonist glorification, instead capturing how collective rage crystallized a cultural movement in real time.
In 1987, five young men, using brutally honest rhymes and hardcore beats, put their frustration and anger about life in the most dangerous place in America into the most powerful weapon they had: their music. Taking us back to where it all began, Straight Outta Compton tells the true story of how these cultural rebels—armed only with their lyrics, swagger, bravado and raw talent—stood up to the authorities that meant to keep them down and formed the world’s most dangerous group, N.W.A. And as they spoke the truth that no one had before and exposed life in the hood, their voice ignited a social revolution that is still reverberating today.
Directed by Edward Zwick
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBattle sequences interrogate heroism itself, showing how Shaw's idealism collides brutally with institutional racism within the Union he fights for.
Robert Gould Shaw leads the US Civil War's first all-black volunteer company, fighting prejudices of both his own Union army and the Confederates.
Directed by Jim Sheridan
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBrown's artistic breakthrough emerges through physical limitation, not despite it—cinema finally finds visual language equal to his stubborn creativity.
No one expects much from Christy Brown, a boy with cerebral palsy born into a working-class Irish family. Though Christy is a spastic quadriplegic and essentially paralyzed, a miraculous event occurs when, at the age of 5, he demonstrates control of his left foot by using chalk to scrawl a word on the floor. With the help of his steely mother — and no shortage of grit and determination — Christy overcomes his infirmity to become a painter, poet and author.
Directed by John Frankenheimer
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSolitary confinement sequences employ stark minimalism to chronicle intellectual awakening in America's most dehumanizing institutional space.
After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.
Directed by Sidney Lumet
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSerpico's alienation visualized through compositional isolation, making whistleblowing viscerally lonely rather than heroically triumphant.
New York cop Frank Serpico blows the whistle on the rampant corruption in the force only to have his comrades turn against him.
Directed by Martin Scorsese
✦ MovieMuse AI takeScorsese's obsessive cinematography mirrors Hughes's mental deterioration, form becoming content in biographical visualization.
A biopic depicting the life of filmmaker and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes from 1927 to 1947, during which time he became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate, while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Directed by Michael Gracey
✦ MovieMuse AI takeUnique visual approach places Robbie Williams as puppet-observer of his own life, biography as surreal self-interrogation.
Follow Robbie Williams' journey from childhood, to being the youngest member of chart-topping boyband Take That, through to his unparalleled achievements as a record-breaking solo artist – all the while confronting the challenges that stratospheric fame and success can bring.
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
✦ MovieMuse AI takeLaurence Olivier's Shakespearean adaptation collapses distance between fifteenth-century monarchy and wartime Britain, using historical biography as propaganda.
In 1415, in the midst of the Hundred Years' War, the young King Henry V of England embarks on the conquest of France.
Directed by Bob Fosse
✦ MovieMuse AI takeJazz-scored montages and fractured chronology mirror Bruce's anarchic comedy style, form mirroring subject matter with rare formal courage.
The story of acerbic 1960s comic Lenny Bruce, whose groundbreaking, no-holds-barred style and social commentary was often deemed by the establishment as too obscene for the public.
Directed by Steven Spielberg
✦ MovieMuse AI takeThough fictionalized, Spielberg's meticulous set-bound approach treats biographical constraint as creative liberation.
An Eastern European tourist unexpectedly finds himself stranded in JFK airport, and must take up temporary residence there.
Directed by Bennett Miller
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCapote's obsession with murderer Perry Smith becomes portrait of artist consumed by his subject, blurring biographical predator and prey.
A biopic of writer Truman Capote and his assignment for The New Yorker to write the non-fiction book "In Cold Blood".
Directed by Gary Ross
✦ MovieMuse AI takeDepression-era horse racing humanizes economic collapse through animal protagonist, transforming sports biography into social documentary.
True story of the undersized Depression-era racehorse whose victories lifted not only the spirits of the team behind it but also those of their nation.
Directed by Oliver Stone
✦ MovieMuse AI takePhotojournalism framing device—images precede understanding—captures how witnessing atrocity outpaces moral comprehension.
In 1980, an American journalist covering the Salvadoran Civil War becomes entangled with both the leftist guerrilla groups and the right-wing military dictatorship while trying to rescue his girlfriend and her children.
Directed by Leo McCarey
✦ MovieMuse AI takeStructural ambiguity about whether reunion occurs questions whether biography captures fact or reconstructed mythology.
A French playboy and an American former nightclub singer fall in love aboard a ship. They arrange to reunite six months later, if neither has changed their mind.
Directed by Werner Herzog
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSurvival narrative stripped of Hollywood artifice, depicting systematic dehumanization with unflinching physical and psychological specificity.
A US Fighter pilot's epic struggle of survival after being shot down on a mission over Laos during the Vietnam War.
Directed by Peter Berg
✦ MovieMuse AI takeTown obsession becomes subject, not backdrop—biography expands beyond individual athlete to indict collective mythology-making itself.
A small, turbulent town in Texas obsesses over their high school football team to an unhealthy degree. When the star tailback, Boobie Miles, is seriously injured during the first game of the season, all hope is lost, and the town's dormant social problems begin to flare up. It is left to the inspiring abilities of new coach Gary Gaines to instill in the other team members -- and, by proxy, the town itself -- a sense of self-respect and honor.
Directed by François Truffaut
✦ MovieMuse AI takeAdèle's obsessive letters structure the film, letting historical source material visibly dominate narrative, creating brilliant interpretive friction.
In the 19th century a mysterious woman named Adele H. crosses the ocean, from Europe to North America, to relentlessly pursue an handsome officer that denies her satisfaction.
Directed by Ken Russell
✦ MovieMuse AI takeTchaikovsky's compositions infiltrate scenes organically, making biography truly auditory—music doesn't score life, it *is* life.
Composer, conductor and teacher Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky struggles against his homosexual tendencies by marrying, but unfortunately, he chooses wacky nymphomaniac Nina, whom he is unable to satisfy.
Directed by Bryan Singer
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHistorical conspiracy thriller paradoxically undercuts heroism, revealing how assassination plots become procedural exercises in futility.
Wounded in Africa during World War II, Nazi Col. Claus von Stauffenberg returns to his native Germany and joins the Resistance in a daring plan to create a shadow government and assassinate Adolf Hitler. When events unfold so that he becomes a central player, he finds himself tasked with both leading the coup and personally killing the Führer.
Directed by Brian De Palma
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSquad dynamics create biographical pressure cooker where one soldier's conscience exposes collective moral collapse, inverting heroic war narrative.
During the Vietnam War, a soldier finds himself the outsider of his own squad when they unnecessarily kidnap a female villager.
Directed by Jonathan Kaplan
✦ MovieMuse AI takeReconstructs trauma through courtroom testimony, making the victim's voice—not perpetrators' actions—the biographical center of gravity.
Out drinking one night after a fight with her boyfriend, three men brutally rape Sarah Tobias in a bar while people watch and cheer. District Attorney Kathryn Murphy takes the case; however, she allows the rapists to receive a mild sentence. A distraught Sarah decides to seek punishment for the men who witnessed and encouraged the rape. To get justice, Sarah must take the stand and revisit the night of her attack.
Directed by Roger Donaldson
✦ MovieMuse AI takeTahitian paradise becomes biographical character itself, nature corrupting rigid hierarchy and revealing mutiny as inevitable human response.
An idyllic voyage to Tahiti in 1789 turns a crew aboard the H.M.S. Bounty against its captain when they find a tropical paradise.
Directed by John Sturges
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGunfight mythmaking deconstructed through Western iconography, exposing how legend obscures historical personhood.
Lawman Wyatt Earp and outlaw Doc Holliday form an unlikely alliance which culminates in their participation in the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Directed by Stephen Frears
✦ MovieMuse AI takeOrton's theatrical reinvention of self parallels Halliwell's erasure—biography captures artistic ambition destroying the relationships enabling it.
When the young, attractive Joe Orton meets the older, more introverted Kenneth Halliwell at drama school, he befriends the kindred spirit and they start an affair. As Orton becomes more comfortable with his sexuality and starts to find success with his writing, Halliwell becomes increasingly alienated and jealous, ultimately tapping into a dangerous rage.
Directed by Alexander Korda
✦ MovieMuse AI takeComic domestic chaos refuses dignification, treating monarchy as absurd personal theatre rather than historic weight.
Renowned for his excess, King Henry VIII goes through a series of wives during his rule. With Anne Boleyn, his second wife, executed on charges of treason, King Henry weds maid Jane Seymour, but that marriage also ends in tragedy. Not one to be single for long, the king picks German-born Anne of Cleves as his bride, but their union lasts only months before an annulment is granted, and King Henry continues his string of spouses.
Directed by Saul Dibb
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGeorgiana's political salons and fashion choices become primary historical documents, validating feminine influence usually dismissed as frivolous.
A chronicle of the life of 18th century aristocrat Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who was reviled for her extravagant political and personal life.
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
✦ MovieMuse AI takeRidiculous premise grounded in exhaustive factual detail, biography becomes portrait of American desperation through specificity.
A former Army Ranger and struggling father turns to robbing McDonald’s restaurants by cutting holes in their roofs, earning him the nickname "Roofman." After escaping prison, he secretly lives inside a Toys “R” Us for six months, surviving undetected while planning his next move. But when he falls for a divorced mom drawn to his undeniable charm, his double life begins to unravel, setting off a compelling and suspenseful game of cat and mouse as his past closes in.
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