Hollywood loves a costume party. Usually, when we talk about a Roaring 20s film, we're thinking of sparkling headbands, polite jazz, and Leonardo DiCaprio toast-memeing with a martini glass in The Great Gatsby. It’s all very clean. Very safe. But honestly? The real 1920s weren't a Ralph Lauren ad. They were a car crash.
If you want to understand the transition from silent film to "talkies," you have to look at Babylon. Released in late 2022, Damien Chazelle’s polarizing epic is basically a three-hour fever dream about the death of an era. It’s loud. It’s gross. It’s heartbreaking. While critics were split—some called it a masterpiece, others a bloated mess—it’s perhaps the most historically honest depiction of the industry's soul during that decade. It doesn't just show the party; it shows the hangover that redefined global culture.
The Myth of the "Polite" Roaring 20s Film
Most movies set in this era lean heavily on the "Jazz Age" aesthetic. They focus on the flapper as a fashion icon. But the 1920s in Los Angeles were a frontier. This was a city built on dirt and orange groves where people were literally inventing a new language of art while high on bootleg gin and whatever else they could find.
Babylon shatters the "classy" myth in the first ten minutes.
We see the set of a silent epic. It’s total anarchy. There are multiple films being shot on the same patch of dirt, separated by only a few yards. If a director needed more "action," they’d just hire actual lions or stage real fights. History backs this up. Early Hollywood was a safety nightmare. According to film historian Kevin Brownlow in his seminal work The Parade’s Gone By, the transition period was marked by a desperate, gold-rush mentality. People died on sets. Careers were made by teenagers who just showed up.
The film follows Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant climbing the ladder, and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a wild-child starlet inspired by the real-life "It Girl" Clara Bow. Their trajectory isn't a neat rise to fame. It’s a frantic scramble to stay relevant before the world changes.
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Why the "Talkies" Were Actually a Horror Story
We’ve all seen Singin' in the Rain. It’s charming! It makes the arrival of synchronized sound look like a series of funny hiccups with microphones hidden in flower vases.
Babylon treats it like a funeral.
The most stressful sequence in the movie involves Nellie LaRoy trying to film her first sound scene. It is excruciating. Chazelle uses long, unbroken takes to show the claustrophobia of the new technology. Because the cameras were so loud, they had to be locked in giant, soundproof wooden boxes called "iceboxes." The actors couldn't move. The directors couldn't shout instructions. The heat inside those boxes was so intense that cameramen would occasionally faint from lack of oxygen.
This was the end of "fluid" cinema. For a few years, movies actually got worse because the tech was so restrictive. You went from the sweeping, visual poetry of late-period silents like Sunrise (1927) to static, boring plays on screen.
The Real People Behind the Characters
Chazelle didn't just invent these archetypes out of thin air. He pulled from the darkest corners of Hollywood lore.
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- Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt): He’s a composite of stars like John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks. Gilbert is the most famous tragedy of the era. He was a massive silent star, but the legend says his "squeaky" voice ruined him when sound arrived. In reality, it was likely a mix of bad recording tech and a feud with studio mogul Louis B. Mayer.
- Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie): Heavily based on Clara Bow. Bow was the ultimate flapper, but she was haunted by a traumatic childhood and a "low-class" Brooklyn accent that the new Hollywood elite despised.
- Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li): A direct nod to Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American movie star. Wong dealt with horrific systemic racism, often losing roles to white actresses in "yellowface" due to anti-miscegenation laws that prevented her from kissing white leads on screen.
- Elinor St. John (Jean Smart): Based on the terrifyingly powerful gossip columnist Louella Parsons. In the 1920s, these writers could end a career with a single paragraph.
The Sound of 1929: A Cultural Earthquake
When people search for a Roaring 20s film, they’re often looking for the music. Justin Hurwitz, the composer for Babylon, did something brilliant here. He didn't use "polite" period-accurate jazz. He created a score that feels like modern EDM played on 1920s instruments. It’s aggressive. It pulses.
This captures the feeling of the era better than a museum-accurate soundtrack. The 20s were about breaking rules. Prohibition didn't stop the drinking; it just made it more dangerous and exciting. The film captures that frantic energy through its rhythm.
But then, the crash.
The 1929 stock market crash is often cited as the end of the party, but for the film industry, the "Hays Code" was the real buzzkill. By the early 30s, the "anything goes" era was being scrubbed clean. The drug use, the blurred gender lines, and the raw sexuality of the 20s were replaced by strict moral guidelines. Babylon shows this transition as a loss of innocence, even if that innocence was covered in grime.
Misconceptions About the Silent Era
A lot of people think silent movies were "primitive." That’s just wrong. By 1927, silent film was a sophisticated, global art form. Directors like F.W. Murnau were doing things with cameras that still look impossible today.
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The tragedy of the 1920s—which this film hammers home—is that we destroyed an entire medium to replace it with another. It wasn't an evolution; it was a replacement. Thousands of actors and musicians who played in theater pits lost their livelihoods overnight.
Is Babylon Worth the Watch?
Look, it’s not a "comfy" movie. If you want a Roaring 20s film that makes you feel good about the past, watch Midnight in Paris.
But if you want to see the friction of history? Watch Babylon. It’s a movie that acknowledges its own medium is a "poisonous, beautiful" thing. It’s about the fact that even if we die, the images stay. There’s a montage at the end that fast-forwards through the history of cinema—from Avatar to The Matrix—suggesting that the chaos of the 1920s is still in the DNA of every frame we watch today.
It’s messy because life is messy.
How to Dig Deeper into 1920s Cinema
If the madness of this era interests you, don't stop at modern recreations. The real stuff is still out there, and much of it is weirder than anything Hollywood makes now.
- Watch the actual "It" (1927): See Clara Bow at the height of her powers. You’ll see exactly where Margot Robbie got her energy.
- Track down "The Crowd" (1928): It’s a silent film that feels incredibly modern in its depiction of urban isolation.
- Read "Hollywood Babylon" by Kenneth Anger: While some of the stories are widely considered to be urban legends or exaggerations, this book served as a major tonal inspiration for Chazelle’s film. It’s the "tabloid" version of history.
- Visit the Hollywood Forever Cemetery: Many of the real-life figures who inspired these characters are buried there. It’s a physical reminder that the "Golden Age" was made by real people who lived fast and, more often than not, ended up broke or forgotten.
The 1920s weren't just about the clothes. They were about the first time humanity saw itself on a screen and decided to change everything to keep the cameras rolling.
To truly experience this era, start by watching Babylon on a large screen with a high-quality sound system to appreciate the jarring shift from silent chaos to the piercing intrusion of early sound. Then, compare it to a remastered version of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) to see the level of artistry that was "lost" when the talkies took over. Observing these two side-by-side provides the best possible context for why the 1920s remain the most volatile and influential decade in art history.