Musicians: Velvet Goldmine (Dir Todd Haynes 2h3m, 1998)

 

The biopic is not an easy beast to tame at the best of times, especially when considering a figure as elemental as David Bowie; perhaps this is why nobody has really tried, aside from the very bad Stardust (2020), the hagiography largely restricted to the sanctioned, all-access, and admittedly impressively panoramic Moonage Daydream documentary (2022). In the hands of Todd Haynes - also the director of the similarly kaledoscopic I'm Not There (2007) in which Bob Dylan is fractured and refracted into born again Christian, actor, rabble rouser, runaway and the aged Billy the Kid - Bowie's glam era is a jumping off point to depict the career of Brian Slade, an almalgam of several English glam rock frontmen (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). 

We follow him, to his mysterious faked death and disappearance through fictionalised account of the period and his relationship with Jim Osterberg-a-like, Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) that owes as much to Citizen Kane and a consideration of queer identity as it does to 'Ziggy Stardust' and extra-terrestrial pomp via Oscar Wilde. Beginning with Oscar Wilde himself as a child, precociously and acronsytically announcing he wants to be a rockstar - the film is peppered with Wildeisms to the point an entire sequence of a daring photoshoot has Slade, a la 'Memo from Turner' delivering great chunks of The Picture of Dorian Grey to a besuited boardroom audience - the film ultimately comes to focus on the figure of Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), introduced in the sexually 'liberated' London of the 1970s as a fan, if not an obsessive, of Slade alongside his fellow Slade-followers. 

They, and the disapproving London of the 1970s arrive to Brian Eno's 'Needle in the Camel's Eye' a slice of driving art rock that together with other Eno songs, various Roxy Music tracks, choice Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel tracks, and several Iggy Pop/Stooges songs, makes up for the lack - via a refusal by Bowie to allow his music to be used - of the man himself; he still makes an appearance vocally, via Lou Reed (himself amalgamated into Wild)'s 'Satelitte of Love'. What follows is a potted reportage, knowingly in the style of Citizen Kane, depicting Slade's rise to fame, faked death, and sudden disapperance. Stuart's own past is threaded throughout the film - needless to say, the film and Haynes himself make no apologies in this being at least partly a depiction of gay self-discovery, and an arrival at Stuart finding his own identity via Slade and Wild, as many did inspired by the fluidity of Bowie, Pop and his ilk, but we meet him next in 1984, tasked with finding out what happened next. 

As he picks through the perspectives of his first manager - an enjoyably camp Michael Feast - and Slade's wife, Mandy (Toni Collette), both bystanders to Brian Slade's rice to fame, and entangment, both romantically and professionally with the Pop-esque Curt Wild, so we are drawn further into the mystery of who Slade was and what happened to him. From here the film follows the two narratives in front of Stuart, and a cliff notes version of the rise and fall of glam rock, focusing in large parts around the creation of 'Ziggy Stardust'-esque record "The Ballad of Maxwell Demon", and the creative fallout between Slade and Wild, Both connect to ultimately depict an ersatz version of the rise in popularity of Slade, with large amounts of cribbing from Bowie's - despite the composite character also including Brian Ferry (apparently) and T Rex's Marc Bolan, neither really ever bob to the surface in Slade's persona - career circa 1969 to 1973.

Here, the film matches its pseduo-narrative with its entirely fictional, queer romantic one, with the impact of Lou Reed (again, largely subsumed into Iggy Pop)'s music on the nascent Bowie, here represented by Wild's Rats, and their pseudo-Stooges shock to the system of the fey, dress-garbed Slade. As with the Haynes directed I'm Not There, the fluidity of rock and roll, and its practioners, is on full display here, Mandy's narrative petering out as her husband essentially falls in love with the sound of, and possibilities of, Wild and his group, only to find this hollow. Certainly, the re-creation of the period's music and feel, particularly at a point where British music was going through its own re-appraisal of the glam rock era, such that members of Suede and Placebo, and Thom Yorke of Radiohead, appear in the bands soundtracking, whilst the recreation of the key moments (The Top of the Pops appearance, for example, is meticulously re-imagined as a frisson between Wild and Slade), rather charmingly plays with the visual iconography of Ziggy era Bowie. 

Remove Bowie from a film largely about him, and one would expect something like Stardust, a hollow empty, and ultimately purposeless film; Velvet Goldmine has to work around the lack of his music, something the soundtrack does well, highlighting through Eno and Roxy Music and Iggy Pop and Lou Reed those artists of the era that inspired and were inspired in turn by Bowie. But Velvet Goldmine is more than hagiography, official or otherwise; it is as much a film about those who were inspired by Bowie, both in embracing themselves, and musically, as it is about one period of his career. 

Rating: Highly Recommended

Velvet Goldmine is available via DVD from Cinema Club and on streaming on Amazon Prime

Next week, we turn it up to 11, and follow the exploits of heavy metal's greatest fictional band in This is Spinal Tap.