There’s no such thing as a soul,” Bart Simpson once said. “It’s just something they made up to scare kids. Like the boogeyman, or Michael Jackson.”

You might argue that nothing helped Michael Jackson more than dying. It meant there were no more high-profile messes for others to clean up, no more accusations of child sex abuse to publicly play out, the man at the centre of them forced to issue denials or walk in and out of courtrooms. But the other boon to the sprawling Jackson estate was the sudden demise of the big, culture-wide Michael Jackson running joke.

The joke insisted that he was strange, eerie, and could detach and re-attach his nose at will. It also insisted that he was nefarious, sexually dysfunctional, and had a chimp named Bubbles. (That last one, of course, was very true.) And the idea of Jackson as a masked oddball, who dressed his children in veils (true, too) and hid in the shadows waiting to strike (less true… maybe), was so ubiquitous that it invaded Scary Movie 3, South Park, Eminem music videos, and the aforementioned Simpsons. And then, once Jackson died, the jokes seemed to stop and the narrative seemed to change. The tragedy of Jackson’s early death, at age 50 in 2009, made it lightly crass to poke fun of his eccentricities, while the Jackson family united behind a common refrain: Michael wasn’t weird, but just too good – too generous, too naive, too endearingly child-like – for this mean, mean world.

So it’s a funny twist to all of this that Antoine Fuqua’s Michael, the estate-backed biopic about the King of Pop that pointedly ends in 1988 and before any of those pesky allegations were made, does an absolutely terrible job of making its hero seem normal. For all its admirably expensive pomp, Michael can’t escape the inherent creepiness of Jackson, and I’m not sure it really tries. It just lays out the surreal madness of the man and hopes audiences will find it adorable.

“You’re not like other people,” Michael’s mother Katherine tells him at one point in the new film, Katherine here played by Nineties stalwart Nia Long (voice a saintly quiver; expression permanently sceptical), and Michael by Jaafar Jackson. Jaafar is the real Michael’s 29-year-old nephew, the son of his brother Jermaine, and a man who, with the help of oodles of facial prosthetics and digital voice trickery, does a very good job of playing a very easily imitable megastar. Katherine’s proclamation can be read two ways, Michael always keen to keep things as obscure as possible.

No, Michael Jackson is not like other people. He’s a production savant; a phenomenal dancer; a supreme vocalist. His music is timelessly brilliant, as evidenced by the many, many performances and pop videos recreated in the film. But he’s also not like other people because – to, say, everyone with eyes – he’s a 24-carat kook. The adult Michael celebrates his professional separation from his domineering father Joe (Colman Domingo, all evil eyebrows and scowling) by buying loads of children’s toys, and would rather play a game of Twister than sleep with groupies, like his brothers. So while they all go off to party, he plays Twister with Bubbles. The Michael of Michael expresses his excitement about working with super-producer Quincy Jones not to any people but to his pet llama, and seems to have only one real, human confidante in his sister LaToya, whose role within the Jackson clan here seems to be “person who wears lots of headbands”. (In reality Michael was reportedly closest to sister Janet of his siblings, but she quite literally doesn’t exist in the universe of Michael – not as a face around the dinner table, nor as a Nick Fury-esque end-credits cameo teasing a sequel.)

Michael also idolises Mickey Mouse and Peter Pan (he’s more or less depicted as the OG Disney Adult – and lest you think I’m being mean to just one man, I think they’re kooks too!), and seems to model his first of multiple nose jobs on Peter’s sharp, upturned honker. And the kids! Gosh, the kids. Michael loves the little guys, sauntering around hospitals like Mother Teresa wearing a single sparkly glove, and pledging to save the world one child at a time. “I have a shining light,” he tells a horrendous wig played by Miles Teller. “I’m here to love, and to heal.”

Bizarrely, Michael Jackson is only so weird in Michael by accident. The film softens any of the context that, ironically, might have helped salvage Jackson’s wider reputation in the public sphere. The real Jackson was a severely traumatised and fragile individual, who spoke movingly about the abuse he suffered as a child. “My father was a severe man – very severe,” Jackson said in 1990. “He used belts, cables, whatever he had on hand. He beat me so hard that sometimes I thought I wouldn’t get out of there. I could hear my mother begging him to stop, and I just wanted to disappear. I was so afraid of him that just seeing him walk into the house made my body tremble.”

And yet, Joe’s abuse is almost entirely scrubbed from the movie. We witness him beat the eight-year-old Michael with a belt in an early scene, but otherwise he is depicted as merely a tyrannical, angry sort who likes to raise his voice but otherwise doesn’t lay a hand on his children. So many scenes seem to be gearing up for Joe to inflict physical violence on those around him, from his sons to Katherine, but he always walks away before interactions get too heated. And there’s a feeling throughout that the movie even forgives Joe – that, really, his volatile management style was just the necessary evil that helped turn Michael and his brothers into greats. Relatedly, the siblings heavily involved in Michael’s production – Jackie, Jermaine and Marlon – have always denied that Joe abused his children.

Unauthorised biographies have also suggested that Jackson’s early exposure to sex workers and groupies also contributed to his atypical relationship to sex, and his inability to understand boundaries or the kinds of relationships that to outside observers will read as wholly inappropriate. Certainly, women are an after-thought throughout the film, from oldest sister Rebbie (who, like Janet, doesn’t exist within Michael), to the women Michael dated throughout the Eighties, including actors Brooke Shields and Tatum O’Neal.

Perhaps those behind Michael simply know their audience, though. Jackson fans are, to put it mildly, very defensive of their idol. I lost count of the amount of times I was told to kill myself after writing a piece on the Jackson abuse allegations in 2019.

The great fascination of Michael, and of Michael Jackson himself, is that every one of us will look at the same stuff and take different readings of it. One Michael viewer will see a deeply strange, damaged individual whose story has been scrubbed of its darkness to protect the family brand; another will see an innocent naif filled with enviable whimsy, whose story has been deliberately half-told because the charlatans and liars that went after him don’t deserve screentime. Jackson is the ultimate human Rorschach test.

“The film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in a fantasy, and they’re going to be happy with it,” Michael’s 28-year-old daughter Paris said last year. “The thing about these biopics is it’s Hollywood. It’s fantasy land – it’s not real, but it’s sold to you as real. The narrative is being controlled, and there’s a lot of inaccuracy.”

It’s unclear what exactly she was referring to. But, true to Jackson tradition, it could be interpreted whichever way you like.

‘Michael’ is in cinemas