A young Michael Jackson was dragged to jail by a cop who thought the Rolls-Royce he was driving looked “like a stolen car,” having somehow failed to recognise the pop icon, his mother Katherine recalls. It seems like a perfect scene for Jackson’s new biopic, which moonwalks into cinemas worldwide on Friday.

But it’s not in the movie, perhaps because it might remind audiences of the singer’s far more troubling encounters with law enforcement and the courts, when repeatedly accused of sexually abusing children.

The film presents a squeaky-clean Jackson: a wholesale whitewashing of the likes not seen since Henry III ordered the painting of the Tower of London’s White Tower in 1240. It is deeply ironic that Hollywood’s biggest movie whitewashing the tarnished reality of a fallen superstar’s troubled life should be about a black entertainer who spent decades lightening his skin as if he wished to pass for white.

The singer’s ever-brightening complexion was supposedly not the result of self-loathing, but rather the side-effect of creams and medications taken to treat “blotchy” skin caused by vitiligo and lupus, according to his son Prince, aged 29. Of course, that hardly explains the multiple surgeries to slim his broad African American nose to a disastrously unnatural sliver, the surgery to sharpen his cheekbones, or the chemical relaxers to straighten his Afro into a lanky straight mane.

Jackson, who died of a pharmaceutical drug overdose in June 2009, aged 50, spent the latter decades of his life obliterating his original image, so it should be no surprise that the new biopic produced by his family and his estate continues the effort to rewrite his history with the £113 million movie.

“It’s a complete whitewash,” says Dan Reed, who directed the award-winning 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, in which alleged victims of Jackson’s child molestation exposed the entertainer’s perverted grooming and abuse of innocent young boys. Children as young as seven shared the singer’s bed, and he allegedly plied them with alcohol – “Jesus juice,” he called it.

The film aims to “rewrite the allegations and dismiss them out of hand,” Reed complains. Even the singer’s daughter, Paris Jackson, aged 28, called the movie “dishonest,” and claimed that producers ignored her feedback. “Michael Jackson biopic will shamefully whitewash his controversial life,” proclaimed the New York Post.

Instead, audiences are expected to believe that Jackson was the true victim: abused by his demanding, belt-wielding father Joe Jackson, and forced to sacrifice his childhood for fame as the child front-man for his siblings in The Jackson Five.

Paedophilia allegations? Forget about it. Closer to a campaign for Pope Leo XIV to anoint Jackson as a saint, the movie stars the singer’s nephew Jaafar, 29 – son of Michael’s brother Jermaine – as the gloved one, following him from a tough childhood in Gary, Indiana, to becoming the crowned prince of Motown, and creating best-selling albums including Bad and Thriller.

The film showcases the unquestioned talent behind hits including Billie Jean, Beat It and Smooth Criminal, and has earned acclaim for its recreation of iconic musical moments in Jackson’s life.

But however closely you watch the film, you won’t see Jackson in rehab – he admitted being “dependent on painkillers” in 1993 – nor his two warped marriages – to Elvis Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie in 1994, lasting barely a year, and his three-year union with his dermatologist’s nursing assistant Debbie Rowe that ended in 2000.

You won’t see him exhausted, ravaged by self-doubt and struggling to revive his beleaguered career when fatally overdosing on prescription anaesthetic Propofol in June 2009.

And you certainly will not see the film portray the allegations of child molestation that saw Jackson’s fabled Neverland Ranch raided by police in 2003, leading to his humiliating trial in 2005. Though the singer was acquitted on all counts, jurors later admitted that they were uncomfortable with his behaviour toward children, but had not been tasked with deciding if he was “a molester in general,” but rather if he had abused the specific children confronting him in court.

Amazingly, the biopic’s original intent was to include Jackson’s paedophilia trial – but only to portray him as the innocent victim of extortion by avaricious parents of a child he had befriended. It was to have been a whitewash of a very different kind from that which is coming to our screens, but a whitewash nonetheless.

The film’s final act was originally centred around the molestation allegations of 13-year-old Jordan Chandler, who shared Jackson’s bed and travelled with him to the Neverland Ranch, Las Vegas, Florida, and Monaco. Jordan’s father, dentist Evan Chandler, growing increasingly suspicious, received a reported £16million out-of-court settlement in exchange for the family’s silence.

But Jordan’s step-father David Schwartz had secretly recorded a conversation that was to be dramatically portrayed in the film, in which Evan threatened to “ruin” Jackson, saying: “I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever.” Jackson, and subsequently his estate, had vehemently denied all allegations of abuse, and aimed to use the film to characterise the paedophilia claims as blackmail.

The singer’s estate, guided by his powerhouse lawyer John Branca – played by Miles Teller in the movie – has impressively revived Jackson’s fortune, if not his reputation, since his demise. He died reportedly £370 million in debt, with some radio stations refusing to play his songs, tainted by child abuse allegations. Jackson’s executors rejuvenated his musical legacy, transforming his estate into a juggernaut worth an estimated £1.5 billion today.

Yet the estate, normally so sure-footed, made a catastrophic error, inexplicably forgetting that Jackson’s legal settlement with the Chandler family had explicitly forbidden any reference to Jordan in any future media productions – including movies.

Having filmed the last third of the film around Jordan Chandler’s story, the filmmakers were forced to cut vast swathes of footage and rewrite the film’s ending, at a reported cost of £11 million for 22 days of reshoots.

The movie’s original planned release in April 2025 was pushed back until last October, then delayed again until it belatedly reaches cinemas this week. It now ends on a climactic high-note, with Jackson’s triumphant Bad world tour in 1988.

The omission of Jackson’s darker side stands in stark contrast to past biopics about singing stars that have embraced their flaws and failings as dramatic counterpoints to make their successes all the more impressive.

Drug addiction is centre stage in the 1972 Billie Holiday story Lady Sings the Blues, the 2004 Ray Charles biopic Ray, the Johnny Cash drama Walk the Line in 2005, and 2024’s Amy Winehouse drama Back to Black. Freddie Mercury’s sexuality brought dramatic reality to 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, as did The Boss’s depression in last year’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Michael, however, delivers a Jackson who is supposedly beyond reproach.

The film received its premiere in Berlin – far enough away from the scepticism of British and American audiences – to a screening of 4,000 devoted Jackson fans predisposed to love such a hagiography. They were wooed with parties, panel discussions with the filmmakers, and other Jackson-themed events, hoping to generate favourable word-of-mouth.

The newly-sanitised version of Michael hopes to strike box office gold by exploiting nostalgia for Jackson’s hits, reliving the heady days when the most disturbing thing about him seemed to be his friendship with pet chimpanzee Bubbles.

But Jackson’s tarnished past continues to haunt him even beyond the grave. Two of his alleged victims, Wade Robson, 43, and James Safechuck, 48, bring their child sex abuse case before a judge later this year. The lawsuit in which the four Cascios siblings – Edward, Dominic, Aldo and Marie-Nicole – are demanding more than the £8 million they settled for in 2020 for child abuse, is still winding its way through the courts.

But audiences may be ready to turn a blind eye to Jackson’s troubling predilections.

When the film’s teaser appeared online in November it garnered 114 million views in the first 24 hours. Pundits believe Michael could be the year’s first movie to earn $1 billion worldwide. Despite her own reservations, Paris Jackson expects the film will appeal to fans old and new who choose to ignore her father’s flaws. “The film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy,” she said. “And they’re going to be happy with it.”

Audiences may yet forgive the movie’s whitewash, even if they cannot paint over Jackson’s sins.