Did you ever get the sense that you’re watching pop culture eat itself?

As intrigued as I am by the decent reviews James Mangold’s new biopic of Bob Dylan, “A Complete Unknown” is getting, there’s a tinge of been-there/seen-that sapping my verve to go out and see the thing. (Note: You should definitely support your local Maine movie houses like The Eveningstar, The Colonial, or Portland’s Nickelodeon, all of which are or will be playing the film. Call it a New Year’s resolution.)

It’s a curse of being a 50-year-plus movie fanatic that movie tropes, trends, and clichés stand out. Bob Dylan is a fascinating figure in American music, certainly. And the early struggles of the young Dylan portrayed in Mangold’s film have become the stuff of legend, at least among aging white guys who want to explain just why the young Bob plugging in his electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was such a big, honking deal.

Plus maybe I’m still not sold on Timotheé Chalamet, who’s essaying Dylan, frizzy hair, mumbly cadence and all. Chalamet is everywhere, seemingly overnight, and while his performances in “Dune” and “Call Me By Your Name” got the job done, the Dylan thing feels like a leap. I dunno, I review “Saturday Night Live,” too, and when he first hosted, I got more of a “get high with Pete Davidson at the afterparty” vibe than I generally expect from my next Best Actor nominees.

Edward Norton, left, and Timothée Chalamet in a scene from “A Complete Unknown.” Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures via AP

Regardless, the music biopic is irresistible stuff for filmmakers and audiences. The residual connection we have with a singer carries over, lending the film a resonance it doesn’t have to try quite so hard to attain. Biopics of iconic rock gods allow us to marvel at the impersonation, breathlessly grade the lip-syncing (to be fair, Chalamet does his own singing in “A Complete Unknown”), and tap our feet.

Plus, no matter how great the resemblance (Oscar winner Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles remains uncanny), a musical biopic inevitably follows the same beats. Rough upbringing, overnight success, relationship struggles, substance abuse struggles, infidelity, ego, rock bottom, quick rebound into creative and personal rebirth, and we’re out. The worshipful, lucrative musical biopic becomes the sort of cliché a great musician would avoid, which makes the genre ripe for parody. So here’s my list of movie biopics of musicians who aren’t real — but whose stories make for a much more entertaining watch.

“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” (2007)

Released right when the “Walk the Line”/“Ray” musical biopic fervor was highest, Jake Kasdan’s career-spanning movie about the titular country star nails every genre cliche to the wall and sets them deliriously spinning. John C. Reilly is Oscar-worthy himself (in a world where comedies get Oscars) as Cox, a Johnny Cash-esque country icon whose journey takes him from ludicrously over-the-top rural poverty and tragedy to the big time with perfectly tuned specificity.

Straying from Cash’s already mythologized life to encompass everything from The Beatles’ mystical flirtation to network variety show cheese to Brian Wilson’s extravagant musical madness, the film is nonstop hilarious while pitching its parody tunes just close enough to reality to suggest that this Dewey Cox guy might be worthy of the big screen treatment after all.

Available to rent on all streaming services.

“The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” (1978)

Monty Python’s Eric Idle was close friends with several of The Beatles, making his decision to make a mockumentary of the legendary’s band’s rise and fall an exercise in chummy parody. For all the in-jokiness (George Harrison pops up in a cameo), The Rutles is as meticulously silly a fake rock doc as will ever exist, with the songs (by longtime Python associate and movie co-star Neil Innes) so spot-on that they won a Grammy. You need to be a Beatles super-fan to catch all the hyper-specific gags at times, but Idle and Innes’ take on this alternate universe Beatles carries enough comic inventiveness to leave you laughing as you hum along to such suspiciously familiar Rutles hits as “Ouch!” and “Cheese and Onions.”

Sadly unavailable to stream. (I have the original vinyl LP with accompanying booklet. Jealous?)

“This Is Spinal Tap” (1984) and “A Mighty Wind” (2003)

Christopher Guest is a deadpan genius at both comedy and music. Co-starring in Rob Reiner’s classic mockumentary about boneheaded British metalheads Spinal Tap and later directing and co-writing (with Eugene Levy) a similarly brilliant take on the folk scene in “A Mighty Wind,” Guest proves conclusively that you have to truly love something to point out its inherent ridiculousness. Both films show once mighty acts on the downslide, as Spinal Tap breaks up between ill-attended gigs at puppet theaters and the aging folkies of “A Mighty Wind” fractiously reunite to recapture very faded old glories.

Both films get huge laughs at the expense of musical ego and fame even as the performers (all playing their own instruments and singing) demonstrate enough talent to keep us irrationally hoping for a comeback. (If you don’t tear up at the conclusion of “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” I don’t wanna know you.)

Stream “This Is Spinal Tap” on Amazon Prime or Pluto TV, and rent “A Mighty Wind” everywhere.

“Popstar: Never Stop Stopping” (2016)

Like “Walk Hard,” this concoction from The Lonely Island team of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer bombed at the box office, suggesting that music fans prefer their rockumentaries on the worshipful side. Also like “Walk Hard,” this is a loopy, hilarious and improbably catchy delight, with the former “SNL” stars channeling former boy band sensation “The Style Boyz” as they cope with post-breakup drama.

Packed with cameos from actual music royalty and songs from the Lonely Island guys that, as ever, walk the line between banger and bananas, the film is as much a takedown of celebrity media hype as the no-worse-then-the-real-thing boy band culture.

Available to rent on your streaming faves.

“I’m Still Here” (2102)

Perennially intense actor Joaquin Phoenix got a Best Actor nomination for playing Johnny Cash in “A Complete Unknown” director James Mangold’s 2005 “Walk the Line.” And then he teamed with director and pal Casey Affleck for this elaborate goof on the very concept of the media-driven myth of the musical genius. In this case, that meant Phoenix took an entire year off from acting to convince the world (through Affleck’s ever-present cameras and a few genuinely alarming talk show appearances) that he was switching careers to become a hip-hop star. The resulting faux documentary (only revealed as a prank after release) sees Phoenix indulging in every egotistical excess we’ve come to expect from the musical biopic, with plenty of terrible but plausible music to boot. A mad, self-indulgent piece of elaborate performance art, the film now stands as one biopic star’s chaotic deconstruction of our impulse to put our musical heroes on the big screen pedestal in the first place.

Stream it for free on Hoopla and Kanopy.