There is a moment in “Michael” where the King of Pop scolds a cameraman for cutting away from the dance mid-performance. It is one of the film’s sharpest lines — and its most unintentionally self-aware. Because director Antoine Fuqua, tasked with bringing Michael Jackson’s life to the screen, keeps doing exactly that: pulling back every time things get truly interesting.

Released April 24 and already generating buzz, “Michael” is the long-anticipated, estate-approved biopic chronicling Jackson’s rise from a cramped Gary, Indiana, living room to the stratosphere of global pop stardom. It is a film of stunning surfaces and careful omissions, spectacular in the moments it allows itself to be, and frustrating in the moments it refuses to try.

The film’s greatest asset, and the reason for buying a ticket, is Jaafar Jackson. Michael’s nephew, making his acting debut at 29, delivers something genuinely remarkable. He doesn’t just mimic his uncle’s moves; he somehow, some way inhabits the particular fragility, steel and poise behind them. The moonwalk, the vocal runs, the nervous energy before a big performance, it all reads as authentic, not imitation.

The supporting cast is equally strong. Colman Domingo brings terrifying conviction to Joe Jackson, the domineering patriarch who simultaneously built and damaged his son. Nia Long is quietly devastating as Katherine. Miles Teller rounds out the cast as attorney John Branca. These are performances that deserve a bolder script than the one they’ve been handed.

The film spans 1966 to 1988 — from the Jackson Five’s early rehearsals to the “Bad” era — and races through those two decades with the breathless logic of a highlight reel. We see the Motown years, the “Thriller” explosion and the Pepsi commercial accident that burned his scalp. Each scene is handsomely staged.

For the people who grew up on Jackson’s catalog, the musical sequences will deliver. Recreations of the Motown 25 performance and the “Thriller” video era are genuinely thrilling. The problem is what surrounds them. The film, produced with full Jackson estate approval, is constitutionally incapable of presenting its subject as anything other than a saint besieged by a cruel father. Jackson emerges with no flaws, no contradictions, no interior life beyond the music. The controversies that defined his later public life are nowhere to be found, and while their absence is unsurprising given who greenlit this project, the gap is impossible to ignore.

The film ends abruptly in 1988 with a title card signaling that the story continues. A franchise setup masquerading as a biopic conclusion. It is a bold move, if somewhat cynical. If a sequel does materialize, it will face the harder chapters of Jackson’s story. Whether the filmmakers dare to tell them remains to be seen.

“Michael” is not a bad film. It is a careful one. And for a subject this complicated — this genuinely, irresolvably complicated, this theater was still packed out and smiles were leaving just as they entered. Go for Jaafar Jackson. Stay for the music. Just don’t expect the full story.