Ambitious but...

Rating: 7/10 (9 January 1999)

Todd Haynes is a freewheeling and daring filmmaker with a uniquely ambiguous take on his subject matter. Was Juliane Moore in "Safe" better or worse off after she escaped to her desert retreat? Is the glam rock Haynes portrays in "Velvet Goldmine" an empty vocabulary of vacuous poses, or a dazzling aesthetic of operatic proportions? "Goldmine" is thematically and creatively an intricate, ambitious movie. The problem is that no matter how effective Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rice-Meyers are as the Iggy Stooge and David Bowie-like characters, they come across as blurred xeroxes of the originals.