Velvet Goldmine Review

Todd Haynes builds his glam rock fantasia on the skeleton of Citizen Kane, sending a reporter back through the life of a vanished pop star. Maryse Alberti's camera is the reason to watch. The concert sequences have a smeared, lurid glitter, and Sandy Powell's costumes treat feathers and platform boots as a serious argument about self invention.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers is beautiful and remote as Brian Slade, which suits a character conceived as pure surface, while Ewan McGregor plays Curt Wild with a raw physical commitment that gives the film a pulse whenever he appears. Bale has the least glamorous job as the fan who grows up into the investigator, and he is very good at quiet, embarrassed longing.

The trouble is that the Kane structure is a trap. Every interview subject exists to hand over a fragment, so nobody is allowed to become a person, and by the final half hour the film has mistaken accumulation for meaning. The Oscar Wilde prologue, with the alien child left on a doorstep, is a joke stretched far past its usefulness. What lasts is texture: bedroom mirrors, backstage corridors, a rooftop kiss shot like a hymn to somebody else's youth.