A titillating pan-gender adventure!

Rating: 8/10 (1 April 2003)

Forget the comparisons between the film's characters and Iggy Pop and David Bowie. The irony that some viewers have missed, is that the film itself echoes its own message, daringly stealing the images of retro pop idols and re-inventing them as its own original creations.
This film is like a dream of an intergalactic cabaret whorehouse on Hallowe'en...except it's actually the early 1970s, and it's about young Earthlings in Manchester making music and living free. It's a story of a desperate need for identity, interlaced with a driven desire of self-expression and hedonism.
"Velvet Goldmine" is lush, colourful and could be decribed as vaguely disturbing eye candy. Much of it is a barrage of music, costumes and glitter, presented in a way that blends modern music video with retro investigative reporting.
The actors are all superb. Ewan McGregor is excellent as the tormented Curt Wild -- really outstanding, mesmerising in fact. Johnathan Rhys-Myers is the perfect Brian Slade, a bisexual image-obsessed glam rock star whose rise to fame and fall from glory is being revisited by a young journalist played by Christian Bale. Toni Colette has come a long way from "Muriel's Wedding" as Slade's glamour-queen wife, expertly dropping in and out of American and English dialect as the situation requires.
I certainly envy the actors for being able to live out their rock star fantasies in this film, and to wear the most fabulously glitzy costumes throughout. Hats off to Todd Haynes for creating a rich fantasy that is close enough to reality to be all that much more fascinating.