The Moonwalk Around the Truth
A $200 million film, a vanished documentary, and the conversation Australian parents can no longer afford to avoid.
Michael, the $200 million biopic already recording the highest earnings for a musical in Australian cinema history, is one of the most morally evasive films to come out of Hollywood in years. It is technically stunning, emotionally manipulative, and built on a lie of omission so large you could moonwalk through it.
And right now, teenagers across Australia are watching it, forming views about a man whose story is considerably darker than anything Lionsgate or the Jackson Estate has chosen to show them. What makes Michael so troubling is not just what it omits, it's how carefully it makes you feel before you can think.
The film deploys a series of emotional levers that are as sophisticated as they are effective. Nostalgia is weaponised first, those opening chords, the choreography, the iconography trigger memory and awe before a single difficult question can surface. Then comes the sympathy arc: scene by scene, Jackson shifts from global superstar to misunderstood victim, pre-loading the audience with empathy so that any later discomfort feels like betrayal rather than inquiry. Strategic omission does the rest, the most serious allegations are side-stepped or diluted, creating what psychologists call coherence bias. The story feels complete. Audiences stop asking questions.
This matters enormously because adolescents don't consume films like this analytically. They absorb them experientially. The teenage brain is primed for identity, belonging, and emotional intensity. When a film offers a powerful emotional journey without equivalent cognitive friction, it doesn't just entertain. It imprints. The film's original cut apparently tackled the abuse allegations head-on. Then a legal clause buried in an old settlement was discovered, the allegations were stripped out at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, and the film was reshot to end in 1988, conveniently before a single accusation had been made publicly. The 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, which won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Documentary and holds a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is currently commercially unavailable, removed after the Jackson estate invoked an obscure non-disparagement clause. The sanitised celebration plays in thousands of cinemas. The documentary that asks the harder questions has been legally buried.
That is not an accident. That is money and power doing what money and power have always done. Dan Reed, the director of Leaving Neverland, has described the film as a deliberate erasure of the abuse allegations. Jackson's own daughter Paris called the script dishonest. When a man's daughter can say that publicly, the least we can do is say something similar at home.
Australians should recognise this pattern. Rolf Harris was convicted of indecent assault against children while the industry that loved him looked away for decades. Don Burke faced a cascade of allegations of sexual harassment and bullying from women who had been quietly warned off speaking out for years. In both cases the institution knew, suspected, or heard the rumours, and chose the star over the person making the complaint. Michael is what that choice looks like with a $200 million budget.
I am not going to tell you to ban this film. But if your teenager is going to see it, see it with them. Don't let it be a solo experience processed alone with a phone. Watch it together, stay in the room when it ends, and be ready. The emotional engineering is that effective, and what your teenager does with the feelings it generates depends enormously on whether there's an adult prepared to name what just happened.
Start with curiosity, not a lecture. What did you think? Was there anything that surprised you? You are not conducting a criminal trial. You are opening a door.
Then name the complexity plainly: There are things the film didn't show. Michael Jackson was accused by several young boys of serious and prolonged sexual abuse. He was never convicted in court. But the accusations were detailed and consistent, and many people who have examined them closely find them credible. There is still no consensus, but that does not make it disappear.
Because here is the question teenagers and adults are genuinely wrestling with: Can I still love the music? I think you can, but listening with awareness rather than innocence is not a betrayal, it is what growing up looks like. Every generation that learns to hold moral complexity becomes slightly better at recognising when powerful people are being protected by institutions that should know better.
The film ends with a title card: ‘His story continues”. It does, in civil court, with $400 million in damages sought from the estate, heading to trial in November 2026. Your teenagers will hear about that trial. Better they hear about it from you first.
Dr Michael Carr-Gregg is a child and adolescent psychologist, author of seventeen books, and a recipient of the Order of Australia.
