I Still Believe (2020)

The Erwin brothers return with another faith-based music biopic, this time the story of Jeremy Camp and his first wife Melissa, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer shortly before their marriage. The film is sincere. It is also, judged against the cultural markers of the present decade, remarkably bare. This is a story about white evangelical college students in California and Indiana, and it makes no apology for that, nor does it appear aware that an apology might be expected of it.

The romance grants Melissa a measure of agency, a spark of personality, a life adjacent to her own story. The machinery of the plot then positions her as a suffering muse whose death supplies the male protagonist with his art. Her function is to decline beautifully and leave a note inside a guitar. There is no racial content, no environmental content, no critique of the Christian music industry that makes Jeremy a star. The film celebrates that industry without a flicker of doubt. Illness arrives as an obstacle to be overcome by faith, not as an identity to be embraced, so body acceptance never enters the frame. No LGBTQ characters appear. No neurodivergent characters appear. The camera studies the couple's devotion with a tenderness it never extends to anything resembling a social question.

The film is openly preachy about God's purpose in suffering, and it wants us to understand that suffering strengthens belief instead of damaging it. This is sermonizing of an old and durable kind, aimed squarely at the choir and delivered without embarrassment. It is not the modern progressive moralizing that has become a cultural flashpoint, and we should not inflate the distinction. The earnestness is total. The invitation to outsiders is polite and faint. A modest entry in the faith-based catalogue, and a nearly empty ledger for our purposes, which is its own kind of distinction in a crowded field.