By Tom Keogh
Special to MSN Movies

Someone once asked Dick Clark, the legendary radio DJ and "American Bandstand" TV host, what he considered the major cause of rock star deaths.

Clark, who knew many late, great rock-'n'-roll musicians of the 1950s, '60s and beyond, might have listed the sordid obvious: drugs, suicide, murder, general debauchery. Instead, he mentioned something tragically ordinary: transportation.

Why not? After all, airplanes took out Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Rick Nelson and several members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Duane Allman and his Allman Brothers Band cohort, Berry Oakley, both died in motorcycle accidents. Marc Bolan and Eddie Cochran were killed in cars.

But the truth is, rock stars die prematurely in all kinds of sad ways. Often their lives and deaths are portrayed and explored in films, including several movies in the current release pipeline. Among them are a long-awaited Janis Joplin biopic, "Gospel According to Janis," starring Zooey Deschanel; "Chapter 27," the story of John Lennon's encounter with his assassin, Mark David Chapman; and "Control," a portrait of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, who killed himself at age 23. (Curtis also appeared as a character in Michael Winterbottom's remarkable "24 Hour Party People" in 2002.)

Films about doomed rock stars -- real and imagined -- may never be in short supply. Here are some of the best.

10. "Biggie and Tupac" (2002) and "Tupac: Resurrection" (2003)

Nick Broomfield's powerful "Biggie and Tupac" is a damning documentary linking the murders of rap pioneers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls (aka The Notorious B.I.G.) to hip-hop's notorious East Coast/West Coast feud. Much of Broomfield's investigation focuses on the work of Russell Poole, an ex-cop who has evidence that the Los Angeles police department obscured its relationship with Los Angeles gangs and Death Row Records, the rap label run by Marion "Suge" Knight.

The Oscar-nominated "Tupac: Resurrection," by Lauren Lazin, is a persuasive if controversial biography about Shakur's life and evolution as a poet, told almost entirely -- using video clips and other archival materials -- from the perspective of his self-discovery. The film is honest about Shakur's contradictions and struggles to reconcile conflicting elements in his life, but it doesn't go out of its way to paint what a lot of non-fans would consider a balanced picture of his words versus his deeds. Still, Shakur had a voice, and it is captured here.

9. "Last Days" (2005), "Kurt & Courtney" (1998) and "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" (2006)

Nirvana's tormented songwriter, vocalist and leader, Kurt Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994 at age 27, is directly or indirectly the subject of these three very different films. Gus Van Sant's "Last Days" is the fictional tale of an alternative rock star, Blake (Michael Pitt), largely based on Cobain. Spending his days in a rundown mansion and nearby woods in Seattle, looking for a solution to his life of users and fans and management, Blake escapes from his fame for a while and lives anonymously, freely, until he finds release.

"Kurt & Courtney" begins as documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield's portrait of Cobain, including old home movies provided by a family member and discussions with a private investigator, a nanny, old friends and others. What emerges, and changes the film's purpose and identity, are questions about a possible conspiracy -- involving Cobain's widow, Courtney Love -- behind the grunge star's "alleged" suicide. Broomfield's visit with Love's estranged father, who maintains that Cobain was murdered, raises the film's tension considerably, leading to a very public confrontation.

"Kurt Cobain: About a Son," as of this writing, has yet to open everywhere, but is an intimate portrait based on 25 hours of recorded interviews with Cobain by journalist Michael Azerrad.

8. "New York Doll" (2005)

Arthur Kane, bassist for the New York Dolls, became a fragile man following the band's breakup years ago. In "New York Doll," documentary maker Greg Whiteley discovers that booze, depression, unemployment and other problems ultimately prompted Kane to change his life and become a member of the Mormon church in Los Angeles. Everything seems under control until an unexpected invitation to reform the Dolls in London with surviving members David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain throws Kane for a loop and finds him slowly coming back to himself as an artist.

Touching (Kane's first meeting with Johansen in decades is caught on camera) and musically exciting, the film is that much more meaningful if one knows that Kane died shortly after the Dolls' resurrection. But what a way to go out for Kane, in the fullness of his identity: part of a rock-'n'-roll legend but also a man humbled by his personal pain and quiet triumphs in recent years.

7. "The Doors" (1991)

Oliver Stone's take on The Doors' story might not have struck many people as factually correct (including bandmember Ray Manzarek). But it played like the version that probably existed in his mind while he was far from the counterculture scene in 1967-68, in Vietnam. In any case, Stone's Jim Morrison (played insightfully by Val Kilmer), like the similar-sounding Jim Garrison of Stone's "JFK," is a man who sees through the veneer of daily life to deeper, more disturbing but ultimately liberating truths stirring within. Unfortunately, Morrison is also a self-destructive maniac, and Stone expertly captures the rock shaman's dual energies to create and destroy. Morrison's sad and seedy, if not uninspired, final days are captured here, as is a sense of deliverance that accompanies his death.

6. "La Bamba" (1987) and "The Buddy Holly Story" (1978)

When someone asked "La Bamba" writer-director Luis Valdez who was going to make a movie about the Big Bopper (the latter had a pop hit in 1958 with "Chantilly Lace" and died in the same plane crash as Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens), Valdez said the story was all there, ready to be made. What a triple-bill that would be: three movies that climax with the same, fateful flight into rock-'n'-roll tragedy, told from three different perspectives. For now, though, we've got two-thirds of a cinematic cross-reference, including Valdez's often thrilling feature about Valens' rise to fame despite racial and family obstacles. Lou Diamond Phillips is wonderful as the naïve, searching Valens, but Esai Morales just about steals the show as the hero's older, envious brother. Real-life rocker Marshall Crenshaw, who has more than a little in common with Holly as a songwriter and performer, is the appropriate choice to play the rock-'n'-roll pioneer toward the end of "La Bamba."

"The Buddy Holly Story" stars Gary Busey in a sometimes weird but always winning performance as the man who gave the world "That'll Be the Day," "True Love Ways" and "Rave On." Busey is great as a restless and bemused Holly, bursting at the seams creatively and trying to harness his musical and personal ambitions into something like success. Director Steve Rash also made an inspired casting choice in Don Stroud and Charles Martin Smith as the Crickets, who can't quite keep up with Holly's drive. Even though one knows Holly's days are numbered, the energy in the film is so strong and infectious it's easy to forget the reaper is out there waiting.

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