In 1988, a German music producer named Frank Farian (Matthias Schweighofer) has already recorded and produced a song called Girl You Know Its True.  He just needs to find two performers who are more photogenic than the middle-aged studio musicians who actually sang it.  Frank discovers Rob (Tijan Njie) and Fab (Elan Ben Ali), two friends who are trying to make it as dancers.  Rob is German and biracial.  Fab is French.  Frank tells them that all they have to do is lip-synch along with the record whenever they’re “performing” the song.  After Frank assures them that this type of thing is done all the time, they agree.  Frank also tells them that they will be known as Top Shelf.

The song becomes a hit and Rob and Fab become stars but they’re not known as Top Shelf, a name that is dismissed as being too German.  Instead, they find superstardom as Milli Vanilli.  With their popularity comes money, groupies, and drugs.  But when word gets out that neither Rob nor Fab actually sang on their record, everything collapses into one of the biggest entertainment scandals of the past 40 years.

I never would have guessed that a good movie could be made about the fall of Milli Vanilli but Girl You Know Its True is a surprisingly compelling and well-acted retelling of the familiar story.  The movie is as much as about the business of fame as it is about the band itself with Frank realizing and explaining that a band’s image is much more important than the music itself.  Rob and Fab are presented as being incredibly naive and trusting when it comes to Frank and his promises, with Rob also sabotaged by a need for acceptance that came out of his troubled childhood.  The villain in this story is not the band but instead a music industry that knowingly looked the other way on Frank’s deception and then scapegoated Rob and Fab when the truth came out.  Rob and Fab each deal with going from being superstars to being pariahs in their own individual way.  It leads to tragedy for one and regret for the other.

Even though I was familiar with the story, Girl You Know It’s True took me by surprise.  It’s a genuinely good film.