Oscar gone Wilde: The Story of a Literate Glam Rock THE REWRITE

In the 1970s, “bisexual” was the word. It was thrown around during interviews and press conferences to describe just how edgy and different this generation was from the ones that came before. The music that accompanied this era of sexual revolution is the subject of Todd Haynes’s film, “Velvet Goldmine.”
Written by Haynes and James Lyons, the film follows a young British expat journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) as he tries to write a story about his childhood hero, the fallen Glam Rock star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers).
As his mind begins to wander in the interviews he conducts about Slade, Stuart visually relates to the audience the story 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 through voiceover 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, and the music industry’s willingness to finance the stars’ insanity, making an organic revolution something corporate.
Stuart’s subject, Brian Slade, is the paragon of this destructive insanity. Slade, who perpetually quotes Oscar Wilde, is obsessed with, and ultimately ruined by, extravagant spectacle. Slade, unmistakably based on David Bowie, uses his bisexuality as a tool to both offend and empower people across Great Britain and the United States.
As the raw, and sexually awkward, film carries on, Slade partners with American bad boy rocker Curt Wild (a hyper-sexual Ewan McGregor), to put on a tour reminiscent of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour, complete with promiscuous, otherworldly costumes, that all the while plays with the music’s history as these artists lived: fast, and loose.
Including music by The Stooges, T. Rex, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, and original music in the spirit of the genre, 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 simultaneously stunning and decrepit 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 grainy, faux archival documentary and concert footage with the crisp cinematography of the main plot footage, making this a film more about the industry than a fairy-tale Glam Rocker.
To make this relatively believable story even more complex, still contains some fantastical elements, namely an emerald that Oscar Wilde, a homosexual whose career was ruined by being outed, 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 fame-giving relic that inspires them to stand strong in the face of bigotry, and confirms for these otherworldly rockers that there is a glimmer of reality and history in their otherwise entirely fantasized world.