David Bowie maintained close control over the use of his music and life story. He refused Todd Haynes the rights to his songs in Velvet Goldmine, preserving them for Lazarus — an off-Broadway musical he composed that premiered shortly before his death. Gabriel Range’s Stardust doesn’t attempt to be a full Bowie biopic, but it does seize on one key moment in his life to try and explain his creativity.
The film follows the musician (Johnny Flynn) on his 1971 American tour to promote The Man Who Sold the World. His label Mercury Records hates the album, and the single “All the Madmen” flops. But Bowie drives around the U.S. with the one Mercury employee, publicist Ron Oberman (Marc Maron, fitted with a cheap wig and fake sideburns), who believes in his merit. As they do so, Bowie is haunted by memories of his brother Terry, institutionalized due to his schizophrenia.
The America of Stardust — though the film was shot in Canada — is strangely underpopulated, full of wide spaces with one or two people in the frame. When Bowie gets questioned by a hostile TSA agent, the airport is unnaturally deserted. The low budget leads to an unconvincing re-creation of the period, and the film does a terrible job of capturing the hippie era’s tail end as it faded into something new.
For a film about a rock star, Stardust is weirdly uninterested in music: Flynn’s performances are thin and lifeless; his version of Jacques Brel’s “My Death,” which plays over the closing credits, should send the film off with a bang, but it misses the song’s inherent passion and melodramatic spirit; Bowie and Oberman talk about the greatness of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed instead of actually listening to their music. The fact that the film depicts Bowie talking with DJs and journalists about The Man Who Sold the World but can’t allow us to hear the album ... well, it feels a bit absurd.
But Stardust’s take on mental illness is the final straw. “All the Madmen” was inspired by Terry, and Bowie’s 1971 song “The Bewlay Brothers” delivered a surreal interpretation of their relationship. Stardust goes much further, suggesting that Bowie himself suffered from a mild case of schizophrenia. This attitude reminds me of people who think that all weird art must’ve been inspired by drugs, except in this case, Bowie must have been mentally ill to come up with the idea for Ziggy Stardust. The film implies this in the clumsiest way possible, cross-cutting between Bowie talking to a journalist and psychiatrist.
The craft, talent and hard work that went into Bowie’s early-’70s music gets short-changed here, in large part because the film can’t play us any of it. (It can’t go further than showing Bowie’s tuneless tinkering at the piano when he tries to write new songs.) Ziggy Stardust was a triumph of image-making, but it stands up because it has plenty of musical substance, synthesizing American proto-punk, the British R&B of the Yardbirds and early Rolling Stones and the European cabaret sensibility of Brel. David Jones played David Bowie better than any actor could, but Stardust offers a shallow, even insulting interpretation of his life and work.
