Revision

Marc Bolan and T. Rex sang of “the children of the revolution” and it is precisely the mid-seventies lives of these British children that Todd Haynes sets out to portray in his 1998 film “Velvet Goldmine”. The glam rock era prefigured the punks and it was a time, similar to today, in which image was everything. The influence of glam rockers such as the aforementioned T. Rex, Slade, the band and early David Bowie can be seen in pop stars of today such as Lady Gaga. “Velvet Goldmine” is a fascinating and exceedingly well-produced film that serves as an adequate introductory course in glam rock; but in the end, the film fails to fully congeal into an entirely successful in part because of its sometimes awkward flashback narrative structure.
Not even the most vitriolic critic could find fault with Haynes’ cast, many of who have gone on and achieved much greater success since their roles in “Velvet Goldmine”. Christian Bale plays Arthur Stuart, a newspaper reporter and obsessive fan of the pop star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), whose “murder” opens the film. Brian Slade appears to be a composite of Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie and Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry, also taking his last name from another glam rock band. Ewan McGregor plays Kurt Wild, the Iggy Pop surrogate while Eddie Izzard and Toni Collette play supporting roles.
The performances are uniformly excellent and clearly show that the actors have studied many of the pop stars that they emulated. In particular, Rhys-Meyers brilliantly captures the coke-addled nature of the seventies pop star. He pays a homage to David Bowie’s televised performance of “Starman” when Slade pretends to fellate his guitarist in mid-song. McGregor also makes a more than passable Iggy Pop and manages to capture the unique, yet extremely self-destructive charisma and mythos that surrounds the ‘Godfather of Punk’. His miming to the Stooges’ classic “TV Eye” is very realistic although there seems to be little historical grounding in the bisexuality of the singer or for really much of the film itself. The film claims to be a historical document of a time period and of a music scene, though there seems to be a great deal of flippancy regarding the historicity of the film’s characters to their possible real-life counterparts.
Haynes does an excellent job of recapturing the atmosphere of seventies glam in the mise-en-scene and set design within the film. One particularly striking scene that shows Haynes’ attention to detail is the one in the Sombrero Club where during Slade’s star-making performance, at a table in the back, men are shown in the back speaking Polari. Polari was the underground homosexual slang spoken by Londoners, commonly during the sixties and seventies.
Another delightful touch was his addition of a female playing the New York Dolls “Personality Crisis,” as this was a song originally done by a New York band of lecherously heterosexual men who wore female dress on stage. The film is filled with allusions and references to pop-culture trivia and it can be a fun game to attempt to spot them. It’s a shame that the film sometimes becomes so muddled up in being visually attractive and outrageous, that the story sometimes becomes bogged down. Yet the film stands as a remarkable encapsulation of the ethos of the glam scene and the ripples that still emanate from it.
The film also stands with the larger body of Haynes’ work as yet another exploration of the artifice that is constant within popular culture. His later film “Far from Heaven” explored what was beneath the surface of the seemingly staid 1950’s home and using the films and style of Douglas Sirk as his guide, Haynes manages to find the beating heart that exists within the seemingly histrionic heart of melodrama. Like “Velvet Goldmine”, the fluidity of sexuality is also important and both of the main characters engage in same-sex relations. This fluidity is not necessarily something that came about in the 1990’s but has been in culture for decades and in the mainstream, however, blatant or hidden.
Another film by Haynes “I’m Not There” engages Bob Dylan, who may not challenge sexual conformity but does challenge the audience’s perception of who he really is. Haynes’ even took the almost unheard of step of having Dylan portrayed by actors of different ages, genders and races in different portions of his life and overall the film, like “Velvet Goldmine” succeeds in being an impressionistic look at a fundamental part of the popular culture. “I’m Not There” also features a plethora of Dylan covers by those who were influenced by the artists, much as “Velvet Goldmine” utilizes covers by Placebo and a band including some of the members of Radiohead. These movies shows an artist who is accumulating a body of work which refuses to bound by traditional narrative rules but which is clearly influenced by them, returns to the sources and then subverts them for his own artistic muse. Hopefully, the future holds another great one.