Velvet leadmine

Rating: 5/10 (18 January 2004)

'Velvet Goldmine' sets out to tell the story of glam rock through a biopic of Brain Slade, a fictional amalgam of many of the real stars of the era. The music and the image are highly convincing (though surely pop videos were not this advanced in the early 1970s), but this is a film unsure of it's purpose: it bears witness in the style of a documentary, but a real documentary about real people would have been more interesting, while we never learn enough about the characters' depths for it to work as pure fiction. Odd moments of artiness can't disguise an amateurish feel to the whole thing. One for fans only.