Todd Haynes's self-indulgent and overreaching excavation of the "glam" scene of the early Seventies. It starts out in mid-19th Century with the arrival on earth of Oscar Wilde, deposited on a Dublin doorstep by flying saucer. After a forward leap of a hundred years, it settles down (somewhat) to a Citizen Kane-like, or Eddie and the Cruisers-like, journalistic investigation of a Bowie-esque rocker under the name of Brian Slade. (The reincarnated spirit of Oscar Wilde is not far away nor hard to spot: one Curt Wild.) Haynes never finds a cinematic form to accommodate his cultural-essay aspirations, and we are continually made aware of corner-cutting, stretching, and patching in the modest production. (The use of dolls in one scene, as in Haynes's Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, is not an example of this; it is an example of self-indulgence.) In common with the humblest of rock-and-roll reminiscences on screen, the movie is most pleasurable in its rummaging through a wardrobe of outdated fashions. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale, Toni Collette. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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