Here we go again.

In Hollywood’s ongoing, joyless attempts to undermine the joy of music by crushing outstanding classical musicians, “Maria” joins the narrow parade of “Tár” and “Maestro.” The new Maria Callas biopic follows the defeats of the fictional conductor Lydia Tár and the larger-than-life Leonard Bernstein with a dramatization of the most compelling singer I’ve ever met – live, on record, on video, wherever. (I’m not alone in this assessment.) All three films have one thing in common: exaggerated musicians are tragically brought down by their own hubris and become monsters. Everyone is a victim of his or her celebrity – something that celebrity-producing Hollywood is pretty good at.

“Maria,” streaming on Netflix this week, focuses on Callas’ reclusive final years, during which, if this report is to be believed, she was pathetically self-destructive. She had lost her voice and her lover and had nothing to live for. She could neither recapture the mythical La Callas nor make peace with the woman Mary. It is a shameful tale of suffering and quixotic temperament.

The dark film begins and ends with Callas’ lonely death. In typical flashback fashion, we witness her decline and delusions as she tries to regain her voice, the attention of Aristotle Onassis, and the adoration of the audience. Flashbacks mix snippets of documentary footage and provide a glimpse into some of the highlights of her life.

The unlikely Angelina Jolie captures Callas’ style in her clothing, public appearance and movements. She wears sensational 50s and 60s hairstyles in shiny perfection. She would make a great plastic doll out of Callas.

The real callas was striking in a different way. Her face didn’t have Jolie’s spectacularly precise proportions. In fact, Callas turned into what she thought was an ugly duckling. When she first appeared on stage in the late 1940s, she immediately demonstrated a serious voice and searing vocal theatricality. But she was a tall woman and is said to have behaved somewhat awkwardly on stage. Director Franco Zeffirelli described her as big in every way – big eyes, big nose, big mouth, big body – and compared her to the Statue of Liberty.

When Callas saw the 1953 film “Roman Holiday,” he decided to look like its diminutive star, Audrey Hepburn. Callas lost 80 pounds in a single year. She had already worked with great directors, notably Luchino Visconti, but now she had the physical means to go much further and invent the modern concept of opera as drama. Her voice had lost some of its luster and those who disliked her blamed the weight loss, which was not the case. Instead, her urge was to bring her entire being into a frenzied theatrical intensity.

On the surface, Callas had become an icon of elegance, but now her big eyes, big mouth, and big voice could penetrate her in a way that no one had ever experienced at the opera. She not only changed herself, but also the art form.

Callas’ opera career lasted less than two decades, ending in 1965. She was only 42 years old when she sang her last staged opera performance, a production of “Tosca” at Covent Garden in London. People thought up all sorts of reasons why her voice was silenced so early. It was only after her death twelve years later that we learned that she suffered from dermatomyositis, which causes muscle weakness that can affect the vocal cords and also likely led to her heart failure at age 53.

Jolie’s voice was slightly mixed with Callas’s, disinfecting Callas’s a little. Joile’s speaking voice sounds almost like Callas’, but without the hint of Callas’ New York accent. Crucially, she misses Callas’ disarming smile. None of this would matter as much if director Pablo Larrain had focused less on delivering glamorous shots of Jolie.

The film is called “Maria” for a reason. Callas’ life was indeed one of conflict between the artist who became great La Callas and the woman who was Maria. But you have to understand both. No doubt she stopped singing because of her physical condition. Still, its size gave it a remarkable ability to transcend biology. But her desire to become more of the woman she wanted to be fueled her obsession with the extremely toxic Onassis.

I saw how extraordinary the transcendent part of this complex equation can be on her ill-fated 1974 comeback tour with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano. As a graduate student at the time, I had a seat on the top floor of the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. The acoustics are the best up there and I bought a pair of opera glasses just to see them.

She sounded pretty bad. The voice was gone. But not the intensity, not the presence. This was actually one of the greatest singing performances I have ever experienced. She seemed superhuman and extremely suffering at the same time. You can’t possibly experience the magic of Callas and the music’s fusion on the terrible underground footage of the concert that can be found on YouTube and elsewhere.

Instead, watch the 1969 film “Medea” by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which Callas plays a purely acting role. Like Larrain and Jolie, Pasolini was fascinated by Callas’ face, particularly her nose. He questions her expressiveness, her extraordinary power. She no longer needs the opera, she is in it. Pasolini uses music as if he were filming a Noh piece, but without masks. The fact that this film receives so little attention in the opera world and even among Callas lovers shows that she is always ahead of her time if you look closely.

Her radical sophistication and courage became even more evident in 1974 when she spoke at a Verdi musicology conference in Chicago. She seemed dignified, eloquent, unsentimental and downright revolutionary. She had no reason to waste her time with musicologists and their talk about neglected early Verdi masterpieces. Knowing what was important and what wasn’t, she suggested taking the best parts of these operas and turning them into something modern and meaningful. She also blamed Puccini for making singers and audiences lazy by not being challenging enough.

A year later, Onassis died, which is said to have caused Callas to lose interest in life. He had left Callas, whom he had never married, to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, but the flame burned in Callas to the end. Her last two years were obviously very difficult, with drugs, depression and dermatomyositis, all of which seem cheesy in “Maria.” I wonder if she became a recluse in part because patients suffering from dermatomyositis are supposed to stay away from sunlight. Her body was failing her.

A more loving and imaginative portrait of Callas in those years is the basis of Zeffirelli’s 2002 biography “Callas Forever,” with Fanny Ardant and Jeremy Irons as her agent. Zeffirelli had worked with Callas and knew her well. To best understand Callas, watch Tony Palmer’s 2007 documentary Callas, in which Zeffirelli is particularly insightful.

For Callas, all the adoration, glamor and high life was a purposeful life of bread and roses. Rather, her art has always been to courageously fill such emptiness with incredible meaning. “Maria,” on the other hand, offers little more than pathos and poses.