Stunningly fails to evoke period or place, people or process

Rating: 1/10 (11 February 2008)

What happened to popstar Brian Slade after his fake death and fall from grace? Does anyone care? Based on the more salient aspects from the life of David Bowie (bisexual wife, mod beginnings, stage alter-ego) this hollow move signally fails to include any of the aspects that might make such a figure fascinating, or even mildly interesting to fans or intimates. Instead Rhys Meyers' Slade is a total cypher,more Gareth Gates than Ziggy Stardust. Indeed, the whole movie plays as if all the key scenes--the ones that establish the characters and their relationships with each other--have been left out.
The movie is also largely clueless about what '70s Britain was like and how glam rock fitted into it. Labouring under the impression that glam was some kind of countercultural youth movement on a par with punk or even New Romanticism, it misses the only truly curious thing about glam--its mainstream appeal.
Crushingly, that movie also strikes numerous false notes when it comes to the music. Any project of this sort faces a devil's choice between reusing the music of the period or pastiching it. Goldmine attempts both. The reassignment of old Roxy Music, Steve Harley and Brian Eno numbers to news performers jars,and undermines some fine songs. And the original numbers are all complete clunkers. The only time this comes close to working is when the Suzi Quattro clone covers the New York Dolls, and Ewan MacGregor--as Iggy Pop-alike Curt Wild--confusingly gets to do an actual Iggy song.
There are compensations--MacGregor's Iggy impersonation is spot on in everything but physique, and Christian Bale demonstrating again what a cruelly underrated and underused actor he is. But--like Absolute Beginners and Moulin Rouge--the movie is crippled by its own artifice. The attempt to rope in Oscar Wilde as a posthumous dialogue writer makes all the characters into identikit posturing bores. And the regular nods to Citizen Kane only underline how utterly non-enigmatic the howling void at the centre of this movie really is.