At two hours, Velvet Goldmine feels interminably long and features the sort of prize pillocks you'd travel across several oceans to avoid.

Rating: Null/10 (15 December 1998)

One definite rule of thumb in the last 25 years. Don't watch a film with David Bowie in it. This counts double for a film actually about him.
Set extensively in London in the early 70s, Velvet Goldmine charts the fortunes of glam-rock star and son of a Brummie roof-tiler Brian Slade (Rhys-Meyer playing Bowie), who vanished after a fake assassination attempt on his life went aubergine-shaped in 1974.
Using an avowedly Citizen-Kane framing device, director Haynes (previous work Safe) has old glam-devotee journalist Arthur Stuart (Bale) writing a story on the 10th anniversary of the key event in glam rock. What ensues is arguably the hugest pile of impenetrable, unfathomable nonsense since Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Skipping around more than a dodgy market stall vinyl record, Haynes implies that a green jewel (the 'Rosebud' device used throughout), which was deposited by a UFO as a gift to Oscar Wilde in 1854, was the acorn of glam rock. Don't ask? It's gibberish. Anyhow, our man Slade (a predatory buggerer of schoolboys in his spare time), encounters a dude named Jack Fairy, and hey presto becomes Maxwell Demon and inherits the power of glam.
Somewhere along the cocaine trail, Brian marries Mandy (Collette) and falls in love with trailer trash rock star Curt Wild (McGregor). Cue lots of "untamed" concert gallivanting, depravity and glitter. Those obsessed with the Trainspotting star will no doubt revel in the Scotsman showing off his arse and tackle (not exactly ideal preparation for Star Wars) and obsessives may enjoy spotting some old record sleeves, but there's not a lot else of note.
At two hours, Velvet Goldmine feels interminably long, features the sort of prize pillocks you'd travel across several oceans to avoid and worst of all singularly lacks character development, empathy and humour.