Actors playing real people is like actors speaking in funny foreign accents, or playing autistic savants or paraplegics — an in-your-face signifier that they’re Acting with a capital A, instead of swanning around being themselves. There’s a whole bunch of Real People Performances jostling for position right now, because we’re well into awards season, and nine of the last 12 best actor and actress Oscars have gone to such portrayals. In the eyes of the easily impressed, playing a made-up character just doesn’t have the same cachet. Michael Sheen squaring off against Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon? It’s the Battle of the Impersonations! Apart from one terrific late-night phone call from one antagonist to the other, entirely cooked up by screenwriter Peter Morgan, I kept thinking I might as well have been watching the original TV face-off instead of Ron Howard’s recreation of the edited highlights.

Stephen Soderbergh’s Che gives us an hour and a half of Benicio del Toro being charismatic in the jungle before he finally gets hold of a beret and starts looking like the iconic Korda photo reproduced on a million posters and T-shirts, though I swear that if I hadn’t already seen The Motorcycle Diaries, I’d have been left wondering just who the hell this guy was. But isn’t it all a bit Barnum & Bailey? All a bit: “Wow!

He may look nothing like the bloke he’s playing, but isn’t it an uncannily accurate impression nonetheless?” Apart from a couple (or, in Che’s case, a lot) of hours’ running time, there’s not much separating these panto turns from equally uncannily accurate impressions by various contemporary and not-so contemporary impressionists. I admire Forest Whitaker

but, honestly, how hard can it have been to play a larger-than-life monster like Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland?

All credit to Helen Mirren, then, who in The Queen actually did succeed in tricking us into thinking that not only was there more to the profile from the stamps and coins, but that we’d somehow never noticed Her Majesty had been a looker all along. There’s something inescapably shallow about the way traditional biopics traipse from childhood trauma to early career to alcohol- or drug-related setback to triumphant comeback, all the while showcasing a shameless example of is-it-real-or-is-it-Memorex grandstanding from Joaquin Phoenix. I reckon the less a Real Person Movie pays lip service to known facts, the more hope it has of capturing something of the essence of its subject.

Many critics, somehow overlooking the word “imaginary” in the title, whinged that Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus bore scant resemblance to the photographer or her life, but Nicole Kidman’s Alice-in-Freaksville performance and her erotic shaving scene with Robert Downey Jr’s human shag carpet touched on odd emotional and artistic truths that would have been beyond the scope of a more orthodox biopic.

Todd Haynes’ decision to cast six different actors in I’m Not There really did hint at the complexity of Bob Dylan, even if the results were uneven. And in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, maybe the best writer biopic ever made, Ken Ogata looked nothing like the Japanese author, but Paul Schrader got under the man’s skin by taking off into flights of artistic delirium that Gus Van Sant and Stephen Soderbergh can only dream of.