There's A Story Here Somewhere

Rating: 2/10 (8 November 2009)

As music video (rock, glitter, glam,or whatever), parts of it might work. As a full-length feature film, none of it works. A film requires a story. There might be one here, but I couldn't find it.
Even a visual fantasy needs some kind of structure, if for no other reason than to propel the fantasy forward. But this "film" seems to have multiple beginnings, a chaotic, nonsensical middle, and a non-resolution. Scenes are put together apparently in random order. Hey mister director guy, help us out here. Is this someone's idea of an inside joke? If so, I didn't find it amusing.
None of the characters are worth caring about. They're all cardboard cutout dolls, stick-figure mannequins, two-dimensional caricatures. Self-proclaimed as artists, they're more flimflam than paragon. Maybe that's the point.
The underlying concept is intriguing. A music star fakes his own death. What ever became of him? And so, the Christian Bale character goes on a Citizen Kane journey, of sorts. But all that glittery glam, or glam-glitter, gets in the way. We're lost in a phantasmagoria of colorfully bizarre images. Along the way we come to the conclusion that the "star" is so shallow, so immature, so unlikeable we lose interest in him and his destiny. The only message I got out of this cinematic mess was that mod music audiences are duped into thinking that image is reality. But that's hardly original. And I doubt that was the director's intent.
Aimed at a pubescent crowd, "Velvet Goldmine" is hardly more than a flashy, moment-by-moment distraction. Lots of films, perhaps most, can deliver a higher quality, more mature form of distraction because they tell a coherent story that requires an attention span of greater than two microseconds.