Billy Joel Calls Unauthorized Biopic Billy & Me “Legally and Professionally Misguided”

The Piano Man isn’t playing along. A new biopic titled Billy & Me, reported Tuesday and set to be directed by Michael and Bohemian Rhapsody editor John Ottman, has been publicly disavowed by Billy Joel’s camp. In a statement to Variety, a representative for Joel said the project is “legally and professionally misguided” and confirmed the singer has not authorized it in any way.

The statement makes clear that this isn’t a sudden falling-out. Since 2021, the parties involved have been officially notified they do not possess Joel’s life rights and will not be able to secure the music rights the project would need. That leaves the film scrambling for a path forward without the artist’s catalog or cooperation.

Ottman’s film is told from the perspective of Irwin Mazur, Joel’s first manager, and has secured exclusive life rights to both Mazur and longtime Joel collaborator Jon Small. A biopic can technically exist without an artist’s hits—Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla managed to evoke Elvis Presley’s world without his most famous songs—but doing so for a musician whose identity is inextricable from his own songbook is a far heavier lift. Most music biopics rely on estate cooperation. Even that’s no guarantee of quality, but it at least gives a film room to use the sound that made the story worth telling in the first place.

The Billy & Me production now confronts the gap between having two tangential life rights and having the central one. Without Joel’s blessing or his music, what’s on screen will be forced to work around a huge absence.