Confused, pretentious mock-epic.

Rating: Null/10 (7 November 1998)

Two young men, one British, one American, become international superstars in the early '70s, practicing a now-ignored musical style known as glam-rock. Glam rock, in case you had forgotten, is forgettable power-trio ballads performed by heavily mascara-ed, sequin-wearing bi-sexual males. David Bowie spent a few years in this phase and skipped out, but other acts, like Mott the Hoople and Gary Glitter, remained true believers, trundling out artery-clogging double concept albums well into the 1970s.
The David Bowie-based character is Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Davies). There's also American Curt Wild (Ewan MacGregor), whose career is languishing after a brief stint as headman of a proto-punk MC5-like garage band in the early 1970s. Slade re-animates Wild's career, brings him on tour, slathers him in mascara, sequins, and feathers, and, naturally, copulates with him. This pretty dull story is told from the perspective of an English journalist, who's sent to determine what has become of Slade in 1984, long after he has dropped off the celebrity radar screen. The assignment rekindles the journalist's misguided teenage love affair with glam rock, much to the audience's chagrin.
The story is mainly told in voice-over interviews with people who knew Slade in the 1970s. By far the most tiresome of these is from Slade's ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette), who is a member of perhaps the most annoying demographic on earth -- talentless, bitter ex-spouses of rock stars. In a whiny, sulky voice, she complains about how when she and Slade married in the early 70s, there was, like, a groovy feeling of sexual liberation in the air. They were divorced after it got a little old watching Slade shellac his mind with galaxies of narcotics while frenetically rogering anything on two legs -- except, it seems, her (What did she expect?). Yawn. The other voice-overs are a little more promising, but hers is by far the most prominent. The accompanying flashbacks feature enough eye-makeup, fornication, drugs, polyester, and sexual ambiguity to last this viewer a lifetime.
The script is, for the most part, pretentious claptrap. Instead of investing the characters with any recognizable character traits (much less sympathetic ones), director Todd Haynes has them prance around striking poses, occasionally uttering vapid, oh-so-clever observations about the nature of celebrity. ("The first duty in life is to create an image. The second duty is yet to be determined.") The only interesting thing about them is the way they dress, and that gets old pretty damned quick. I suppose the underlying theme here is that there's no point in getting to know these characters under the surface because their entire lives are devoted to cultivating their external appearance. Whatever sociological accuracy this theory may have, it's fatal to the narrative. Because these dumb, self-involved, inarticulate sybarites offer nothing to hold the viewer's interest, their little spats and couplings and musical mincings are about as interesting as Canadian Parliament. Nevertheless, Haynes presents these doings with PBS-documentary touches (spinning newspaper headlines, excerpts of press conferences and news reports), that invest them with a sense of fake solemnity.
Even if the characters generated a spark of interest, the movie is replete with turgid, self-indulgent musical set pieces that cry out for the cutting-room floor. The audience is forced to watch movie actors perform contemporary pastiches of not-terribly-good glam-rock songs. Mind you, these are not fragments of performances -- you must sit through the entire song, which seems to take as long as 7 or 8 minutes. Whatever narrative flow the movie might have had is terminally constipated by these interludes of sheer torpor. I left the theater and was surprised to find the movie had only lasted two hours, since it seemed like a good three.
A complete wash.
BA