Not just fantasy (Spoilers!)

Rating: 9/10 (7 February 2004)

I love this movie - I've seen it some 15 times and just got the DVD. I think it has some of the most erotically charged musical performances on film. This film captures the sexiness of not only glam rock, but the hard-edged proto-punk style of the Stooges that influenced it. In very clever ways, this movie references the real people, music, style, and politics of the mid-70s. In addition to that, it weaves together themes of social isolation, discontent, and disruption, as well as time, memory, and "history" which is always "the fiction of empires". Using the work of Oscar Wilde was particularly effective, because Wilde fashioned himself an artist and asthete above all, and a social critic, but not a liberal in any modern day sense. The characters (and their real life counterparts) likewise seek to change the world merely by challenging the norms while looking fabulous. Nice work if you can get it.
But most people here seem to miss out on the obvious conclusions of this film! *Brian Slade is Tommy Stone*, that is, it indicts David Bowie for selling out, renouncing his bisexual past, and becoming more mainstream in the 80s. Meanwhile, the culture as a whole lost its zing, got homogenized, and the postmodern revolution came to a grinding halt. Not the least element in this is the not-so-subtle jab at "President Reynolds".. gee, I wonder who that is. Personally, I don't agree that the 80s signaled a complete collapse. The pendulum did swing to the right a bit, but then that's to be expected. And the new wave pop of the 80s never would have happened without glam and punk. A good deal of 80s pop was made by openly gay artists about openly gay themes as well.
Two things in this movie stand out at me as odd. First, MacGreggors's Curt Wild is a dead ringer for Kurt Cobain. It's downright creepy in the scenes where his hair is blonde. I have to wonder if this was intentional. If so, I can certainly see how 90s grunge was at least in part a descendent of the same musical trends, and some of the social trends. Punk, glam, and many of their relatives are based around rock music as simply a middle finger. Grunge certainly fit into that. Kurt Cobain was known to wear a wedding dress at some of his performances, strictly as a joke. Anyone who doesn't get the point of simply being outrageous in relatively harmless ways is a member of the establishment, spiritually if not physically. They're part of the problem.
The second thing, and the only serious screw-up in the movie that I see is that in order to come to his big epiphany, Stuart recognizes Stone's press secretary on television as the wardrobe mistress to Brian Slade, even though he only knows about this person through Mandy Slade's flashback as recounted to him. It's never established how he could have recognized this person. The point is made clear to the viewer, but within the film it's a pretty big plot hole.
Everything else that seems too fantastical, or non-sensical, is just playing with memory. Did Stuart and Wild really hook up? I don't think it's important. I think the idea is that as we fetishize a past that cannot be retrieved and perhaps never really existed, we want to insert ourselves into it. The minute a social trend becomes recognizable, it has ceased to be original and rebellious, and will imminently be co-opted and mainstreamed. Maybe the creators of "glam rock" knew that better than anyone and, as suggested in the film, pulled the plug before it became trite.

At least it finally became cool again to be bisexual. And we don't have to wear eyeliner and feathers to do it.