Stardust review – Bowie biopic is an act of rock ‘n’ roll suicide

When I first listened to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, everything froze in a cosmic suspension. The part-sci-fi, part-storytelling, masterpiece has the supernatural ability of a rocket launching you into a listening experience which is lyrically and sonically transcendent. Although radically different, the album A Larum by Johnny Flynn is also an example of gifted storytelling – his melodic folk songs transport you to a wonderland full of eccentric characters. Hearing that an upcoming film would combine the best of both singers, it was hard not to be excited.

Yet, when news broke that Bowie’s family had rejected the film and denied the rights to his music, I had a sinking feeling that it was destined for a biopic black hole… 

Stardust is a slipshod biopic based on David Bowie’s 1971 trip to the US where he found inspiration for his alternative supernatural persona – Ziggy Stardust. The film is directed by Gabriel Range and stars Johnny Flynn as a young David Bowie. The film starts promisingly; it shows a moonage daydream – an on the money mash-up between Space Oddity and Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey. However, as the movie progresses, inventive scenes such as these are all too scarce.

The film is set just after the release of The Man Who Sold The World, an album which has largely failed to take off. Tony Defries, Bowie’s manager at the time, summons Bowie into his office in the film’s opening, telling him to try to “break” America, if he wants to become a star.

“Who are you, David?” Defries asks, “Are you an artist? A spaceman? A madman?” This fear of madness runs throughout the whole film, using the case of his half-brother Terry Burns, who suffered from schizophrenia, as a means to do so. Terry exists as a way for Bowie to confront fears of who he is (David Jones) to make way for who he could become (Ziggy Stardust). The film was right to address the impact of Terry’s schizophrenia on Bowie and his work, though you can’t help but feel the whole thing was over-dramatized.

The other relationship at the heart of this production is that between Bowie and his North American publicist, Ron Oberman of Mercury Records. The pair set out on a Green Book-esque road trip together, Chicago to Philadelphia, New York to LA. Oberman, played by Marc Meron, excels at portraying all the bells and whistles of a 70’s music publicist – the loud-mouthing to the vehement enthusiasm. Except, it turns out Oberman wasn’t your typical publicist. His brother Michael said recently: “I’ve never heard Ron curse [….] I don’t have a problem fictionalising it into a buddy road trip. That’s fine. But don’t portray my brother as being this crass, jive-talking publicist.”

Bowie hops from performing to disinterested crowds to audiences of vacuum cleaner salesmen – the whole trip and film for that matter, is a total flop. But flops aside, I pinned my hopes on two important moments in the 1971 road trip which could have redeemed the film. The first moment being when Bowie attends a Velvet Underground gig in New York and mistakes Doug Yule for Lou Reed, praising the wrong man for his performance. The mishap led to a light-bulb moment for Bowie – he realised just how easy it was to impersonate someone onstage. The film touches on this briefly but fails to flesh out Bowie’s increased interest in blurring the line between real and fake. The other moment was when Bowie visits Andy Warhol’s warehouse; a chance to portray the creative playpen in full- swing but instead we only got to see an inch of the infamous Factory, and no sign of its silver-wigged proprietor. Both scenes were soulless when they had the potential to be spellbinding.

Bowie and Flynn’s physical dissimilarity was impossible to ignore too; it felt akin to sticking a golden retriever’s face onto a raw-boned whippet – Bowie’s characteristic androgyny was lost in Flynn’s friendly features. Granted, not all actors can be the spitting image of whomever they are depicting but sticking false teeth and adding a misshapen red wig will not convince anyone. Appearances aside, Flynn’s acting, and singing were near-perfect – it just wasn’t Bowie.

The final scene shows a performance in 1972, where Bowie performs as Ziggy Stardust for the first time. The scene fails to excite and worse, denies you the spine-tingling sensation you get when you hear a star sing at a climacteric moment. (See: Bohemian Rhapsody’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Rocket man’s ‘Your Song’ or Control’s ‘She’s Lost Control’). The film would have done better to have finished with Ziggy Stardust’s debut on Top of the Pops, a famously provocative performance which took his new persona to stratospheric heights.

Stardust did the best it could with what it had, but what it had was not enough – the buck should have stopped when Bowie’s estate refused permission. The biopic just about scratches the surface of watchable due to Flynn’s performance as a half-baked Bowie and Maron’s overly fictionalised but entertaining Oberman. But my recommendation is, if you are a fan or fiend of Bowie, stay clear of a film so lacking in his sound and vision. For those who know nothing of Bowie, who have no preconceptions – I implore you, if you want to gain a greater sense of the metallic man in the stars, please watch Five Years or Finding Fame instead.