1971.
Glam Rock explodes onto the world scene in a blaze of glitter and guitars. At its centre the flamboyant Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Together with outrageous American rocker Curt Wild(Ewan McGregor) they challenge conformity and take on the world!
1974.
Suddenly, at the height of his career, Slade decides to fake his own death on stage. The stunt backfires and he is never seen again.
1984.
It's the 10th anniversary of Slade's disappearance and journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is sent out to expose the truth behind the myth.
Controversial and explicit, Velvet Goldmine takes you on a journey into rock'n'roll excess. Back to the Stardust 70s. Back to the sights and sounds of the Glam era to a time when anything goes.

Somewhat misleadingly described by many as a mock-biopic based on the life of David Bowie, Velvet Goldmine is so much more than that. Journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) who sets out to discover whatever happened to Ziggy Stardust-like Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), the famous bisexual glam star who crashed and burned spectacularly, but in the process helped Arthur awaken his own sexuality. It's an insane homage to 1970s glam rock in the UK as only an American, who knew the movement from a distance, would make; it's a tribute to film director Nicolas Roeg's best work, particularly Performance and the Bowie-vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth; it's a sci-fi movie about an alternative reality (the film's "present" is a 1984 that never existed and frustratingly never clearly explained); it's a queer Citizen Kane with lashings of eye-glitter, a complete mess, an absolute delight and a chance to see Ewan McGregor naked, in case you didn't catch him in The Pillow Book, as the Iggy Pop-like Curt Wild, Slade's lover/protégé. Director Todd Haynes, who made the incredibly spare Safe and a biopic about Karen Carpenter with Barbie dolls, crams in everything--including the kitchen sink, all the washing-up and half the larder-- as if terrified he'll never get another chance to shoot even a commercial again. The pacing drags like a catwalk-queen's glittery taffeta train at times, but then glorious swooping musical numbers and clever bits of allusive business arrive that will brighten the day of many a pop-fan and film-buff. Never anything less than ruthlessly inventive and demanding of patience and an open mind, it's one for connoisseurs. Viewers who prefer easy-viewing eye candy are well advised to stick with fluff like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. --Leslie Felperin

``Velvet Goldmine'' is a movie made up of beginnings, endings and fresh starts. There isn't enough in between. It wants to be a movie in search of a truth, but it's more like a movie in search of itself. Not everyone who leaves the theater will be able to pass a quiz on exactly what happens. Set in the 1970s, it's the story of the life, death and resurrection of a glam-rock idol named Brian Slade, played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and probably inspired by David Bowie. After headlining a brief but dazzling era of glitter rock, he fakes his own death onstage. When the hoax is revealed, his cocaine use increases, his sales plummet, and he disappears from view. A decade later, in the fraught year of 1984, a journalist named Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is assigned to find out what really happened to Brian Slade. Do we care? Not much. Slade is not made into a convincing character in ``Velvet Goldmine,'' although his stage appearances are entertaining enough. But a better reason for our disinterest is that the film bogs down in the apparatus of the search for Slade. Clumsily borrowing moments from ``Citizen Kane,'' it has its journalist interview Slade's ex-wife and business associates, and there is even a sequence of shots that specifically mirror ``Kane''--the first interview with the mogul's former wife, Susan. ``Citizen Kane'' may just have been voted the greatest of all American films (which it is), but how many people watching ``Velvet Goldmine'' will appreciate a scene where a former Slade partner is seen in a wheelchair, just like Joseph Cotten? Many of them will still be puzzling out the opening of the film, which begins in Dublin with the birth of Oscar Wilde, who says at an early age, ``I want to be a pop idol.'' I guess this prologue is intended to establish a link between Wilde and the Bowie generation of crossdressing performance artists who teased audiences with their apparent bisexuality. Brian Slade, in the movie, is married to an American catwoman named Mandy (Toni Collette) but has an affair with a rising rock star named Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who looks like Kurt Cobain, is heedless like Oscar Wilde and is so original onstage that he upstages Slade, who complains, ``I just wish it had been me. I wish I'd thought of it.'' (His wife, as wise as all the wives of brilliant men, tells him, ``You will.'') The film evokes snatches of the 1970s rock scene (and another of its opening moments evokes early shots from the Beatles' ``A Hard Day's Night''). But it doesn't settle for long enough on any one approach to become very interesting. It's not a career film, or a rags-to-riches film, or an expose, or an attack, or a dirge, or a musical, but a little of all of those, chopped up and run through a confusing assortment of flashbacks and memories. The lesson seems to be that Brian Slade was an ambitious, semi-talented poseur who cheated his audience once too often, and then fooled them again in a way only the movie and its inquiring reporter fully understand. In the wreckage of his first incarnation are left his wife, lovers, managers and fans. It is a little disconcerting that the last 20 minutes, if not more, consist of a series of scenes that all feel as if they could be the last scene in the movie: ``Velvet Goldmine'' keeps promising to quit, but doesn't make good. David Bowie (if Slade is indeed meant to be Bowie) deserves better than this. He was more talented and smarter than Slade, reinvented himself in full view, and in the long run can only be said to have triumphed (if being married to Iman, pioneering a multimedia art project and being the richest of all non-Beatle British rock stars is a triumph, and I submit that it is). Bowie is also more interesting than his fictional alter ego in ``Velvet Goldmine,'' and if glam rock was not great music, at least it inaugurated the era of concerts as theatrical spectacles and inspired its audiences to dress in something other than the hippie uniform. Todd Haynes, the director and writer, is an American whose first two films (``Poison'' and ``Safe'') were tightly focused, spare and bleak. ``Safe'' starred Julianne Moore as a woman allergic to very nearly everything--or was she only allergic to herself? These films were perceptive character studies. In ``Velvet Goldmine,'' there is the sense that the film's arms were spread too wide, gathered in all of the possible approaches to the material and couldn't decide on just one. --ROGER EBERT

Dazzling and dizzying, confusing and even annoying, "Velvet Goldmine" is a feverish dream of a film, a riot of color and attitude that is all pop decadence, all night long. Believing like its characters that "style always wins out in the end," it flamboyantly displays the skills and the drawbacks of one of the most gifted of independent filmmakers, writer-director Todd Haynes. Haynes' "Poison" won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1991. His Julianne Moore-starring "Safe" was as smart and provocative as independent filmmaking gets, and this work, typically, has a lot on its mind, sometimes more than it can successfully handle. "Velvet Goldmine" is best at spotlighting Haynes' showy visual sense, his gorgeous flair for simply playing around with film. Working as usual with accomplished cinematographer Maryse Alberti, Haynes creates wave after wave of images that seem to ripple across the screen. Even though this film can be difficult to follow and at times displays the less-than-subtle character sense of, say, "The Young and the Restless," it is never less than compulsively watchable. Haynes' subject in "Velvet Goldmine" is the glam- rock era of the early 1970s, when, a BBC narrator reports, "the streets of London are ablaze with sparkle makeup and glittering frocks," and not just on the women. Artists like David Bowie, Elton John and T. Rex's Marc Bolan mocked the rules of gender fashion, and sexual identity was considered a less than rigid concept. "Velvet Goldmine" has not so much re-created the look of those days as artistically re-imagined it with an emphasis on the outrageous. Production designer Christopher Hobbs, makeup and hair designer (don't ask) Peter King and wizardly costume designer Sandy Powell (Oscar nominated for both "Orlando" and "The Wings of the Dove") have combined to operatic effect, creating a world that almost literally makes the head spin. Also attention- getting is the film's extensive soundtrack, intended, an opening on-screen note informs, "to be played at maximum volume." With its seamless melange of original recordings (like T. Rex's "Cosmic Dancer"), covers of originals by current bands, and music written for the film in the glam manner, the music is energizing and practically wall to wall. It contributes to "Velvet Goldmine's" ability to convey the excitement and the danger of rock, the posing, the nihilism, the eagerness to shock and the subverted rage that make this music a perennial threat to the status quo. Yet another of "Velvet Goldmine's" concerns is conveying the flaunting of pan-sexual androgyny that characterized the period. Furthering that aim is the adroit casting of the two central rock performers and putative lovers, the David Bowiesque Brian Slade, a.k.a. Maxwell Demon (played with grand icy hauteur by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and the wild American proto-punk Curt Wild (the protean Ewan McGregor, who gets to scream, howl and indulge in full-frontal nudity). Not everything about this film, however, is impressive. The film's framing device, involving the character of newspaper reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), often feels awkward. We see Stuart both undertaking a "Citizen Kane"-type investigation of rocker Slade in 1984, 10 years after the man's heyday, and, in extended flashbacks, having his own life as a teenager seriously affected by the glam movement. After a typically out-there opening sequence linking Oscar Wilde, a mysterious jewel from outer space and a glam-rock avatar named Jack Fairy (Micko Westmoreland), "Velvet Goldmine" takes us to an infamous 1974 Slade concert that had a profound effect on the man's career and the entire glam movement. The rest of Slade's story is told through interviews Stuart conducts with people such as Slade's burned-out ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and his first manager, Cecil (Michael Feast). Making extensive use of outrageous videos, flashbacks, supposed concert footage and TV interviews with the likes of star-maker Jerry Divine (Eddie Izzard), plus a scene using dolls (which echoes Haynes' mind-bending "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story"), the film goes back and forth between several time periods, often not letting the audience know that a flashback has started until we're well into it. It's a mixture that can be intoxicating. As the opposites who attracted, Rhys Meyers and McGregor are eye- popping characters on stage, but "Velvet Goldmine's" sporadic attempts to investigate them as real people is less successful. With so much emphasis put on images that delight, provoke and outrage, who can wonder that dramatic insight is not always there for the taking. --KENNETH TURAN

Nominated:Best Costume Design

Won:Best Costume Design
Nominated:Best Make-Up/Hair

Won:Best Artistic Contribution - Todd Haynes
Nominated:Golden Palm