Wanna be a pop idol? Haynes shows you how

COURTESY MIRIMAX FILMS Collette (left) and Meyers are a helluva lot prettier than you are.

In a primary school in late Victorian-era England, a classroom of sweet-faced little boys are taking turns standing up and telling teacher what they want to be when they grow up. It would seem that Brittania has plenty of doctors and barristers in her future, until it comes time for the little one with the big hair to get to his feet and state his goals. Staring ahead serenely, he says, "I want to be a pop idol."

The scene is funny and shrewd in all the ways writer-director Todd Haynes needs it to be in order to establish the central theme of Velvet Goldmine, a lush triptych of the brief, sex-and-drug-soaked, glam-rock heyday of early '70s London.

Haynes knows that everyone wants to be a pop idol, a desire achieved literally by a precious few and vicariously by the rest of us. Goldmine adopts the vantage point of the rest of us, the fans: it sees glam as a screen upon which its audience can project their urges toward exhibitionism and sexual experimentation, a reader-constructed fable which is at once arch, laughable, sexy, and deeply poignant; it's a Ferry tale. And who better than Oscar Wilde--the romanticized victim of puritan hypocrisy and a celebrated advocate of pretty, garish surfaces, of pleasure for its own sake--to stand in as the forerunner of glam's gender-bending, mock-operatic pageantry?

At the center of the pomp and circumstance is Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a figure resembling Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie. It seems that in 1974, at the height of his fame, Slade faked his own on-stage assassination. (He's decked out in full glitter makeup, towering feather-boa wings, and a skintight white sequined suit when he's "shot"--all in all a lovely canvas for a sudden bloom of crimson.) Ten years later, a British reporter and former Slade acolyte (Christian Bale) is assigned to track down the vanished star. He finds Slade's brittle, burnt-out ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and Slade's former friend and lover, the languishing American rocker and Iggy Pop analogue Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), but Slade himself proves elusive.

The framework of the film is modeled on Citizen Kane: the central figure remains enigmatic because he is apprehended only through other people's recollections. But while Kane granted its title character internality and recognizable motivation, Haynes is insistent upon Brian Slade's remaining as much of a cipher to the film audience as he would have been for his worshipful fans. He is, despite his rooster crowns, platform heels, and painted face, a blank slate.

The idea works on paper. Haynes is asking us to make up a back story for Slade, and Wild too, although we do see a few quick flashbacks of Curt's trailer-park upbringing and harrowing electro-shock therapy, which his parents ordered "to fry the fairy right out of him." We are expected to infer and romanticize, to make up our own story, like a good fan should. And to a great extent this conceit also works on screen, primarily because Jonathan Rhys Meyers is quite possibly the most beautiful creature who ever walked the earth, and because Ewan McGregor not only embodies Iggy's scrappy, visceral omnisexuality, but also shares the dirty-choirboy good looks and self-destructive, fatalistic air of Kurt Cobain.

But Haynes is so loyal to his central idea of audience-member-as-fan that he prevents himself from making a uniformly compelling film. As stunning as the faces and bodies and sets and costumes may be to look at, they are the props of what is often boring moviemaking. Much of Velvet Goldmine is taken up with recreations of concerts, videos, press conferences, and magazine covers--the raw materials that a fan uses to construct a pop narrative. But Haynes refuses to compose a narrative himself. The recreations of Bowie and Iggy's halcyon days don't add up to anything greater than expert mimicry; one might as well watch the real thing.

Still, much of Velvet Goldmine is weirdly moving despite its distance from its subject--perhaps even because of it. Early on we see little Jack Fairy, in short pants and school tie, encircled by dozens of his classmates, who are viciously kicking and punching him. Jack grows up to be a pop idol too, perhaps of the Bryan Ferry model: razor-thin with shaved eyebrows, a Louise Brooks coif, wardrobe and makeup by Cesare of Dr. Caligari. Jack is all over Velvet Goldmine: we see Jack making out with Brian, smoking at breakfast with Curt, and commandeering the stage, but we never hear him speak. It's enough to know that he is "different," and damaged because of that difference, but also a star because of it.

Velvet Goldmine is all gorgeous surfaces, and just because Haynes declines to break those surfaces does not mean that one cannot sense all the pain and beauty simmering beneath them.

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• Mirimax's official site for Velvet Goldmine