Let's start with what nobody can argue with. Michael had one of the most extraordinary opening weekends in modern cinema. Antoine Fuqua's film opened April 24 to an audience that showed up in a way Hollywood rarely sees anymore. Not out of obligation, not out of habit, but out of genuine hunger to see this particular story told on a massive screen. The numbers reflect that kind of cultural appetite and they are impossible to dismiss.

At the center of it all is Jaafar Jackson, Michael's nephew, stepping into the most scrutinized acting debut anyone could imagine. Playing a family member who also happened to be the most famous entertainer in human history is not a role you audition for and coast through. Jaafar understood the assignment at a level that goes beyond preparation. There is something in the way he inhabits certain moments. A specific kind of stillness before the music kicks in. A physical precision that does not feel studied at all. It makes you forget you are watching a performance, and that is the highest compliment you can give any actor.

Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson and Nia Long as Katherine give the film its emotional gravity. Without them, the spectacle of Michael's rise would feel weightless. They root the story in something real. The complicated and often painful architecture of a family that produced genius and paid a serious price for it. A price the film only partially acknowledges.

Which brings us to the part of this conversation that actually matters. The film ends in 1988. That is a creative and legal decision, not an artistic one, and audiences deserve to understand the difference. The third act of Michael Jackson's life is entirely absent from this film. The allegations, the trials, the acquittal, the global debate about accountability. The closing title card suggests the story continues. It does. But only in a sequel that has not been made yet.

What you are left with is a film that is genuinely thrilling in stretches, beautifully performed, and deliberately incomplete. Whether that incompleteness bothers you depends on what you came to the theater looking for. If you came for the music, the movement, and the mythology of his early rise, you will leave satisfied. If you came for the full human being, you will leave with questions. Michael Jackson was one of the most layered, contradictory, and singular people the entertainment world has ever produced. A film that loves him this much owes it to him, and to us, to eventually reckon with all of it.

Michael is in theaters now.