Girl You Know It’s True
Written and Directed by Simon Verhoeven
Starring Elan Ben Ali, Tijan Njie, Matthais Schweighöfer, and Bella Dayne
Unrated
Runtime: 2 hours and 4 minutes
Available via Vertical on August 9th

by Susan Keiser, Staff Writer

“I don’t care if they were singing or not … I freakin’ love Milli Vanilli.”

The children must know about Milli Vanilli.

I have no idea what the average kid thinks about the music of the late 1980s, if at all. But when I was five or six years old, Milli Vanilli was one of my absolute favorite musical acts, and the lip-synching scandal which torpedoed their career was one of my very first lessons in disappointment. I grew up with the jokes, and almost a kind of shame that I admired these two very talented dancers (and slightly less talented singers). That shame turned into sadness when Rob Pilatus died from an accidental drug overdose in 1998, but shortly thereafter, Milli Vanilli returned to being a cultural artifact and punchline of the George H.W. Bush era.

Girl You Know It’s True is an entertaining, if by-the-numbers biopic, which isn’t the worst thing in the world. We live in an age where music biopics are skewered so much that it’s hard to take almost any story of a musical group seriously, especially one that was the punchline and laughing stock of the entire Western world in the early 1990’s. Girl You Know It’s True leans into the tropes of musical biopics and 1990s movies, from the “hi, you may be wondering how we got here” of its narrative form, to the obligatory clip of Jay Leno making a low-effort joke on late night TV, but that is exactly the gravitas a film of this level deserves.

Tijan Njie and Elan Ben Ali are Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, better known to the entire world as Milli Vanilli. Pilatus, a German breakdancer whose white adoptive parents treat him more as a virtue signal than as a son, finds a kindred spirit and brother figure in Fabrice Morvan, who came from a more formal dance background out of Paris.They become prominent dancers in the Munich club scene when they are discovered by Ingrid “Milli” Seigrieth (Bella Dayn), kicking off a meteoric rise and fall including three Billboard Hot 100 #1 hits and a Grammy award for Best New Artist that was unceremoniously taken away, all within a two-year period.

Matthias Schweighofer (Army of the Dead, Oppenheimer) oozes problematic charm as music producer Frank Farian, who masterminds the Milli Vanilli operation. Farian had success a decade earlier with the disco group Boney M., who used Farian’s modified voice along with Black performers as the front face of the band. Despite his good intentions, there is a real creepy quality to Farian’s modus operandi, and at least by the ‘80s, Farian had the presence of mind to have other Black session singers (including Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howell) to sing for Rob and Fab.

Simon Verhoeven (no relation to the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, but the son of German director Michael Verhoeven and international film star Senta Berger) does a much better job than any number of directors would have with the material. (Fabrice Morvan’s life rights were already previously attached to a competing project led by disgraced director Brett Ratner, which explains Fab’s relative distance from this film.) Girl You Know It’s True is a prestige picture in Germany, where it won the 2024 Bavarian Film Prize for Best Picture, and was also the winner of several German Film Prize awards, and it is clearly a way for Verhoeven to break further into the American market, the way Frank Farian saw Milli Vanilli as his ticket to fame in the United States.

There are few “victims” in Girl You Know It’s True, and even fewer people portrayed in the film that do not have some sort of executive or associate producer credit on the film. Even the rappers behind Numarx, who were originally screwed out of a fortune when their original song “Girl You Know It’s True” became a worldwide hit, are given their due here, including record executive (and executive producer) Kevin Liles. And ultimately, seeing everyone make up with each other to celebrate this brief cultural moment is kind of endearing.

Girl You Know It’s True wouldn’t be a Milli Vanilli biopic if it weren’t surface-level, but the obvious tropes are hit with a deft touch, and beyond the sex, drugs, and sushi rolls, there is a real heart to it. If you can stand having all four of their hits stuck in your head for the next week, I highly recommend Girl You Know It’s True, but if you don’t, we can just blame it on the rain.