Velvet Goldmine

As I type this, Deb's off in Arizona, touring the Grand Canyon and preparing for a half marathon tomorrow. She left Thursday and won't get back until late Monday night. So I'm here with the girls all weekend, which is cool. Today was dominated by soccer games and tomorrow we're going to visit my mom in NH. But one thing I've been doing in the evenings after the girls go to bed is catching up on some movies on Netflix that I know Deb won't dig. Thursday night, I watched Goon, a hockey film from Jay Baruchel that was great. And last night, I caught up with a movie I've been wanting to see since it came out way back in 1998...Velvet Goldmine.

Directed by Todd Haynes (Safe, I'm Not There, Far From Heaven), the movie was a critical and commercial bomb when it came out. It's a fictionalized look at the glam rock scene of the mid-'70s, with its main character Brian Slade and his alter ego Maxwell Demon (played by Jonathan Rhys Myers) clearly based on David Bowie and his Ziggy Stardust phase. I never caught it in the theaters when it came out but I did pick up the soundtrack, which featured some originals from the era (Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love," T. Rex's "Diamond Meadows," Roxy Music's "Virginia Plain"), new songs (from Grant Lee Buffalo, Shudder to Think and Pulp) and all-star covers of songs from  Roxy Music, the Stooges, T. Rex, the New York Dolls and Brian Eno. It's an entertaining collection.

David Bowie famously disavowed himself from the film after he learned it was based on some unflattering biographies of him (including one by his ex-wife Angie), so there's no Bowie music used in the movie. Still, Brian Slade and his wife Mandy (played by Toni Collette) are pretty obviously stand-ins for Bowie and Angie, while Ewan McGregor played Curt Wild, who is a combination of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, and who has a fling with Slade. And Christian Bale plays a reporter who grew up as a glam fan and a decade later is assigned to track down Slade, who disappeared after faking his death on stage. The movie uses Citizen Kane as a parallel, with Slade in the role of Kane, but there's no Rosebud, no childhood object or memory that reveals why he is the way he is. Like Bowie, Slade is a mysterious figure who assumes other personalities skillfully.

Unlike so many music biopics, Haynes chooses not to follow the traditional story arc, instead illustrating the campiness and glory of glam with music video montages. That seemed to drive critics nuts back in '98, but it makes for an interesting film and it has aged well, as others such as the AV Club's Scott Tobias have detailed. The performances are good: Rhys Myers gets Bowie's androgyny down, although he seems a little more of a blank slate than Bowie was; McGregor does a pretty spot-on Iggy impression, right down to dropping trou on stage while singing "TV Eye"; and Bale is about as far from Batman as possible in his portrayal of a teen outcast who uses glam as a way to express his repressed sexuality and as the older, wiser Arthur Stuart.

Much like glam itself, Velvet Goldmine is an underrated and interesting trip through time and space.