'Velvet Goldmine' Review: Oscar Gone Wilde: The Story of a Literate Glam Rock

In the 1970s, “bisexual” was the word. It was thrown around during interviews, press conferences to describe just how edgy and different this generation is from the ones that came before. It is the music that accompanied this era of sexual revolution that is the subject of Todd Haynes’s film, “Velvet Goldmine.”

With an all-star cast, including Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Toni Collette, “Velvet Goldmine” (written by Haynes and James Lyons) tracks the quest of a young British expat journalist Arthur Stuart (Bale) as he tries to write a story about his childhood hero, the fallen Glam Rock star, Brian Slade (Meyers).

Using an almost disorienting amount of voiceover from conversations with interview subjects, Stuart visually relates his own story to the audience about his sexuality, and his ostracism growing up listening to the music that ultimately drove him from his childhood home.

The stories his interviewees tell him add context to Stuart’s own tale, highlighting the power of a musical movement to save souls like Stuart’s from the harm of conventional society, as well as the music industry’s willingness to finance the stars’ insanity, making an organic revolution something corporate.

Stuart’s subject, Brian Slade, is a textbook example of this destructive insanity. Obsessed with, and ultimately ruined by, over the top spectacle, the Slade character is unmistakably based on David Bowie, whose bisexuality is used as a tool to both offend and empower people across Great Britain, and eventually the United States.

As the raw, and occasionally sexually awkward, film carries on, Slade partners with American bad boy rocker Curt Wild (McGregor), to put on a tour reminiscent of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour; all the while playing with the music’s history as these artists lived: fast, and loose.

The original music is written and performed in the style of the period songs that the film uses as its soundtrack. Including music by The Stooges, T. Rex, Lou Reed, and Brian Eno, the film runs the gamut of epic hits from the era in a manner that precariously straddles jukebox musical and impressive reinvention of classic songs.

Toni Collette’s Ameri-Brit accented Mandy Slade put it this way in her interview when asked about Wild and Slade: “They weren’t people, they were ideas.”

Despite this apt claim, Haynes adds a tremendous amount of realism to the film by mixing in faux archival documentary and concert footage with the main plot footage, making this a film more about the industry than a fairy-tale Glam Rocker.

To complicate things, this relatively believable story still contains some fantastical elements, namely an emerald that Oscar Wilde receives as a young boy from outer space.

The emerald is passed from Glam Rocker to Glam Rocker, weaving an oddly literate fellowship among pop idols who seem to have no regard for books. Perhaps though, it is this extraterrestrial object that confirms for these otherworldly rockers that there is a glimmer of reality and history in their otherwise entirely fantasized world.