Producers: Quirin Berg, Max Wiedemann and Kirstin Winkler Director: Simon Verhoeven Screenplay: Simon Verhoeven Cast: Elan Ben Ali, Tijan Njie, Matthias Schweighöfer, Graham Rogers, Bella Dayne, Tijan Marei, Samuel S. Franklin, Mitsou Jung, Penelope Frego, Roxanne Rittmann and Nico Ehrenteit Distributor: Vertical
Grade: B
Most musical biographies, even the warts-and-all ones, have a hint of hagiography to them; this one shows some sympathy for subjects who are usually treated with disdain, and sets them in a satirical send-up of the music business as a whole, and, even more expansively, of the culture of empty celebrity they represented. Simon Verhoeven’s “Girl You Know It’s True” is a cheekily over-the-top telling of the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of Milli Vanilli, the high-stepping dreadlocked, tight-jeaned, leather-jacketed duo of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, whose career was wrecked by the revelation that they were lip-synching “their” songs (purloined by their producer from other bands) to tapes recorded by others, including the fabulously successful title tune.
Their career was short indeed. Their debut album, released in 1989, won them a Grammy for Best New Artist in early 1990. (The award was later revoked.) In July, 1990, a hard-drive malfunction at a live concert had revealed the lip-synching, and in November their producer Frank Farian confessed the whole business and effectively torpedoed their viability as an act. He continued to work in the business until his death in 2024; they were treated as pariahs. Pilatus died in 1998 of an overdose; Morvan is still alive.
Looking back, the whole affair was a tempest in a teapot. But it was treated as some sort of gargantuan cultural scandal, and the fate of Milli Vanilli still resonates as a sort of cautionary tale today. Luke Korem made a well-received documentary simply titled “Milli Vanilli,” released in 2023, that laid out the entire episode in detail.
Simon Verhoeven’s movie is very different, an ultra-glitzy, cheerfully irreverent extravaganza that doesn’t ignore the pair’s part in the deception that brought them down but portrays them as victims, too—victims of a system that revels in phoniness and of a man who knew how to manipulate it. Verhoeven doesn’t exonerate Morvan and Pilatus, but he does say they were as much used as users.
Of the two, Pilatus gets the deeper treatment. Per the script, he was the son of an American military man and a German woman, placed in an orphanage before being adopted by a white German family. After suffering condescending treatment, he left home, became a model and dancer, and linked up with Paris-born Morvan to form a joint act. They were noticed by music producer Farian, who became their Svengali, and ultimately their betrayer.
Elan Ben Ali and Tijan Njie are utterly convincing as Morvan and Pilatus (whom Romeo Guy Da Silva plays as a boy in the early scenes), capturing not only their look but their sheer onstage energy. Matthias Schweighöfer plays Farian like a Nazi general, laying down his law to them, determining the songs they would perform to (but not sing) and assigning them their name (in a particularly amusing scene, with Milli coming from the nickname of his girlfriend, played by Bella Dayne, and Vanilli from the ice cream they were all enjoying at the time). Farian is unscrupulous but, at first, extremely successful in gaining them popularity. From the very beginning, however, the artists actually singing the songs they lip-synched to—John Davis (Samuel S. Franklin) and Brad Howell (David Mayonga)—and the little-known groups whose songs he pilfered, like Baltimore-based Numarx, were disaffected. The seeds of disaster existed from the start.
Not that the duo didn’t contribute to their own downfall. Verhoeven portrays them as intoxicated by their fame and more than happy to indulge themselves in the decadence afforded by their new status. They tell us so themselves in narration delivered in joint conversation—some of it posthumously—years later.
And yet they offer excuses for their prima donna conduct: they were young, naïve, and bound by the contract they’d unthinkingly signed with Farian. They wanted to do their own singing and songwriting, but he nixed the idea. They were able, with the help of the assistant (Todd Headlee) Farian imposed on them, to secure a vocal coach, but their sessions devolved into drug-driven parties. Verhoeven also inserts a subplot about Pilatus’ unhappy effort to reconnect with his biological father, which adds to his decline.
The movie has been glossily made. The production design (Heike Lange), art direction (Christian Pralle), costumes (Ingken Benesch) and set decoration (Alexandra Pilhatsch and Kate Van Der Merwe) mimic the period ambience with zest, and Jo Heim’s cinematography accentuates the vividness. A trio of editors– Alexander Berner, Felix Schmerbeck and Elena Schmidt—add to the energy, with the musical numbers especially propulsive.
You have to treat any musical biography with a degree of suspicion, this one more than most; even the title carries an ironic warning. But without accepting the movie as gospel, you can appreciate the vitality with which it depicts an odd episode in pop music history that continues to resonate despite its essentially trivial nature.