Velvet Goldmine

American Todd Haynes' gay daydream about glam rock, something happening in a far-off land. It seems much camper than the real thing and follows a recent trend by being more or less biographical. Where Grace Of My Heart was a virtual Carole King, this gives us a neo-Bowie (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and a crypto-Iggy Pop (Ewan McGregor, a bit too pretty for the part but good value and able to wave his tackle about to his heart's content in an "essential to the plot" sort of way). Haynes lets it all hang out too - this is the most unhinged music-biz film since The Doors and nearly as formless. The writer-director gave us the impressive, stylistically drab Safe, which is a polar opposite to Velvet Goldmine's overkill. For all the feather boas and sequins, the best wardrobe award goes to Eddie Izzard, as a pin-stripe suited, fur-coated manager. But Izzard is still an actor-in-reverse: He seems lost with a script. The flashback structure is based - sometimes too closely for comfort - on Citizen Kane. Ultimately, your degree of interest is likely to be in proportion to your interest in the musical era it represents. Just think, someone out there is probably already hard at work on a film about the New Romantics.