For those who grew up in the 80s, Michael Jackson was a thread inextricably woven throughout their childhood. His music was the soundtrack of their youth. Not since Elvis Presley had a single man so dominated the cultural pulse with his music, and for fans of the King of Pop, Michael will be a toe-tapping, aisle-dancing time machine that sends them smiling and moonwalking out of the theater.

If, however, you were looking for a hard-hitting, emotionally wrought drama that deconstructs the idiosyncratic man behind the legend and the controversies, you'd best ease on down the road.

Michael is essentially a two-hour Michael Jackson musical retrospective that peppers in biographical elements, a loose narrative carrying the viewer from one stage of Jackson's career to the next on a velvet pillow, lit in the warmest, most flattering light.

Since situational drama is a bolt-on feature rather than a backbone, performances and music drive the film, and fortunately, both fire on all cylinders.

Joe Jackson, played to perfection by Joe Coleman, occasionally pops in as a two-dimensional antagonist, nipping at Michael's heels and helping to paint the song-and-dance man as a sympathetic victim. Coleman disappears into the Jackson patriarch, and if he'd been given more raw meat to gnaw on instead of a perfunctory predatory co-dependent, he'd be on the fast track for every Oscar-bait role over the next two years. Even with the character sketch he was handed, Coleman's brilliance can't be dimmed. Joe is a rapacious, self-serving psychopath who looks at his son like a hungry lion eyes a lame gazelle, and Coleman makes you feel it. He is quietly the best thing in Michael.

A lot has been said about Michael's nephew, and Jermaine's son, Jaafar Jackson, who plays the pop icon, and it's almost all well-earned. As debut performances go, his is a strong one. During the dramatic moments, he leans a bit too heavily on a default smile when the internal gears don't quite catch, but for a role whose shoes would swallow most seasoned performers whole, he more than holds his own.

When the film shifts to physicality, it stops flirting with greatness and steps fully into it. There is a lot of dancing, as there should be, and this is where Jaafar stops acting like Michael and simply becomes him. The precision, the looseness, the electricity, it is all there. For audiences who grew up at Jackson's peak, it will feel less like watching a performance and more like remembering one.

The film goes out of its way to paint Michael sympathetically. We see him visiting sick children, and we are reminded that he gave his Pepsi settlement to the burn unit that treated him after the infamous commercial mishap. His idiosyncrasies are present but carefully kept at arm's length. We are shown the isolation, the reliance on his mother, the retreat into a world of exotic animals, and we are given faint echoes of his father's abuse, but the film never digs in. It gestures, then shamones on. The pain is acknowledged, not examined.

That is because this is not a reckoning. It is a celebration.

And like any good celebration, it knows when to end the party. The film strategically ends with the iconic London performance from the Bad Tour, stopping the clock just before the storm clouds gather in earnest.

As pure entertainment, Michael is absolutely worth your time. If you are looking for deep honesty and uncomfortable introspection, you will not find it here. The drama exists just enough to string together a narrative, but the film belongs to the music and the movement. It is built to make you feel good, and it succeeds.

You will tap your foot. You will move in your seat.

Whether you can fully enjoy it will depend on something the film refuses to wrestle with, and something you will have to. If you can set aside the shadow of the allegations, you will likely leave the theater grinning. If you cannot, no amount of moonwalking will quite carry you there.

It's because of those unsettling, unresolved allegations that we can't, in good conscience, fully endorse Michael as Worth it, but the entertainment value and transportive nostalgia can't be denied.