MichaelB wrote:I see no-one's mentioned Ken Russell yet, so I will.
(Mind you, his best biopics were generally made for the BBC in the 1960s - The Debussy Film arguably being the most interesting because it's as much about the difficulties of making an accurate biographical study on film as it is a portrait of the composer)
Duh! What an oversight! Russell's early work is a fine example of using the presumed familiarity of the biography, and the biopic format, to explore different kinds of narrative structures and storytelling techniques.
Another example that springs to mind, from slightly later, is the Dennis Potter-scripted
Casanova series from the 1970s, which involves a fiendishly clever and beautifully orchestrated structure of flashbacks and flashforwards (it actually makes you realise that the flashforward is a technique that is almost never used in its genuine sense, or particularly effectively even when it is). It's a much more formally interesting work than Fellini's contemporaneous
Casanova (which is probably my favourite late Fellini, and a film that also tackles the challenges of the biopic with originality and gusto).
While we're sniffing around Great Britain, Derek Jarman's
Wittgenstein is also worth a look as a bold grappling with the form, and, if it counts (a crypto-auto-bio-pic?), there's the magnificent
Bill Douglas Trilogy.