Oh, dear. It’s here. The David Bowie biopic. The one we’ve all been warned about. And you really wish it wasn’t. Now, if you’ve been following the narrative arc of this film’s production, even halfheartedly, you’ll probably have heard that Bowie’s estate point-blank refused to license any of his music for it. Apparently they didn’t like the overt references to Bowie’s sexuality or the parallel storyline concerning his elder half-brother and the supposed “madness” in the family. Consequently there is no “Space Oddity”. No “Life On Mars?”. No “Ziggy Stardust”. No “Young Americans”. No “Fame”. No nothing. And, having seen it, I can’t blame them. The family, that is. They’re almost certainly holding out for a star-studded Rocketman/Bohemian Rhapsody-style jukebox musical, and with good reason.
It’s not that the script is terrible. It’s just that while attempting to portray Bowie’s metamorphosis from gangly singer-songwriter to pansexual glam-monster – squeezing two years of Bowie’s life into 110 minutes, rather than his entire career – what we’re left with is an inconsequential road trip. Having landed in America in 1971 intent on playing a short series of small gigs, Bowie was forced to undertake an even shorter promotional tour of radio shows because he had the wrong visa, and this brief interlude is used as the catalyst for his reinvention as Ziggy Stardust. Any casual Bowie aficionado will know, this is all true. But the road trip conjured up here by director Gabriel Range is filled with clodhopping flashbacks featuring Bowie’s almost comically challenged brother and there are parts where, afraid you’re going to laugh, you simply look away.
The film really is that bad.
Not that it isn’t possible to make a decent biopic of a musician without any music. Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy is something of a minor masterpiece and that didn’t have a single Beatles song in it. But it was blessed with a pitch-perfect portrayal of John Lennon by Aaron Johnson and a script that left you with a different, more nuanced impression of the star than the one you started with.
Of course, the big problem with Stardust is that Johnny Flynn simply isn’t pretty enough to play Bowie. Bowie was always far more beautiful than his wife, Angie, although here Angie (played by Jena Malone) looks like a 1990s supermodel, while Flynn looks like a lantern-jawed roadie. He acts like a roadie too, a camp roadie who increasingly looks as though he regrets answering the call offering him the job. Sure, the chap who plays Marc Bolan (James Cade) might look like a reject from Fraggle Rock, but that’s still no excuse for Flynn to play Bowie as though he lives on Stella Street.
Even though it looks like it was made on a pretty thin budget, the period detail is excellent, while the first two minutes of the film are really, really clever, mixing visuals from the “Space Oddity” promo clip with the psychedelic time slip from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as soon as Flynn opens his mouth you know the film is doomed. He isn’t good enough, the script isn’t good enough, the direction isn’t good enough and without Bowie’s music the film is nothing but a sideshow.
And there’s the rub. When Bohemian Rhapsody came out, my elder daughter wanted me to take her to see it. As anyone who has seen it knows, the script is fairly entry level, the narrative is pretty colour-by-numbers, but the film is gifted with a) a breakthrough performance from a genuine new talent – Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury – and b) 20 of the world’s favourite Queen tracks.
Having spent nearly two hours in the company of Stardust – a film that, remarkably, seems to get incrementally more awful the longer it lasts – it made me long for a Bowie song, any Bowie song. Maybe not “The Laughing Gnome”, but you get my drift.
Finally – and this is important – when Bowie finally morphs into Ziggy Stardust (now complete with non-designer stubble, apparently), how the hell did they get the haircut wrong? One of Bowie’s earliest and most enduring gifts to the Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame, and one of the most iconic motifs in popular culture, was the Ziggy Stardust hair. And the makers of Stardust screwed it up (with screwed-up eyes).
The film – appalling though it is – I can forgive. But the hair? Never.
Stardust is out now.
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