Stardust opens with David Bowie in spacesuit as Keir Dullea playing David Bowman. We're in full Kubrick mode with the flight through time and space. Can you hear me? Someone asks. And asks. And again. We wake to land in New York. No one to meet and greet - what is happening? He was promised a full and proper tour. A stranger in a strange land promoting The Man Who Sold the World?
Bowie is in a cleft stick, promoting an album about madness - the one topic he is terrified to approach, that one word triggering a response he is unable to control. Why does he go? Because he is yearning to be acknowledged as the artist he wants to be.
The dominant emotion is fear, switching from dark/sad to funny/brilliant via flashbacks. The predominant colour is a ubiquitous, patterned, depressive brown - the signature of the seventies. The most frequent images are of endless corridors leading to a kind of hell.
Who can play this anorectic, heroin-thin David Bowie? Well, it's useful to have someone with the training and endurance required for the outer version. With a bit of tweaking - lens for the eye, teeth prosthetics and possibly way too much lettuce to create the emaciation (there's a very bony spine on view later) - Flynn achieves a Bowie that looks right. Then there's the inner Bowie. In terms of talent Johnny Flynn is the goods. He covers the full skill set - sings, plays guitar, moves, mimes - he's done the hard miles in the music industry (literally driving around North America with miniscule budgets), he's fought Mercury Records, he is the creative process in making music. Like Bowie, he is musically and verbally sophisticated and eclectic in his sources and mentors. He's a survivor and he's weathered tough times.
Bowie can be described as a little bit fey - which in full "lost in translation" mode turns into Yiddish feygele which turns into American fag. This does not go down well at US Customs or anywhere else in God's own. Clearly, he is weirding out the Americans (and he is weirded out by them). So, the American tour is a series of small catastrophes - based partly on cultural misunderstandings and a careless attitude on the part of his British Manager but more often on a deliberate refusal by Bowie to engage with the questioners' probing assumptions.
The trip might be simply a comic odyssey that could happen to anyone, even Mr Bean. But overlaid with Bowie's personal and creative anxieties it takes on another dimension. He's a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway and the black loops of the power lines, hunkering down in the back seat of the clapped-out station wagon under the protection of his hat. The saga of car journeys, gas stations, food stops, grim hotels and even grimmer "events" where Bowie is supposed to woo a disinterested crowd like a performing seal are as distressing to us as they must have been to him.
And the distress of his American handler from Mercury Records, Ron Overman (Mark Maron - terrific), is also palpable and sourced in a large, warm and human background which contrasts strongly with Bowie's maternal home. Bowie's mother was reportedly cold and difficult. His aunts on her side showed schizophrenic symptoms. She has given birth to a daughter and adopted her out. His brother Terry is floridly schizophrenic and rejected by his mother. The film hints at an R D Laing diagnosis of Terry by his psychiatrist - very much 1971 (see Mike Leigh's Bleak Moments). Traumatic rejection as an issue. David's next. That traumatic rejection is coming for him too, possibly in the form of audience rejection. No wonder he accedes to Angie's version of love which is controlling but engaged. Angie is fiery, tough and more than a touch solipsistic. Jena Malone plays her like a walking flame thrower. Possibly she dreams of a career of her own equal to that of David's. And she has infantilised David - he is a polite child throughout until the final ascension to Ziggy.
Bowie's first performance (to a crowd of vacuum cleaner salesmen) is notable for the contrast between his slam-dunk performance of Good 'Ol Jane and the indifferent crowd who just fixate on his dress. Another opportunity comes at another unofficial gig where he's not wearing the dress and gives a fierce rendition of Jacques Brel's In the Port of Amsterdam but then flees for a quick hit/bonk rather than chat to the only reporter who seems open to his music when she asks "are you one of the madmen?"
At his first interview he reclines like a nicely arranged odalisque on a sofa, dress flowing, with a mask on a stick - trying to connect with a disbelieving interviewer by resorting to mime (Lindsay Kemp had a lot to answer for, I'm thinking). Continually Bowie fluffs his lines, his opportunities, his interviews and his audiences. Later he's talking on the radio to Middle America via a DJ who uses three syllables to pronounce England. He's been told to be wholesome. Light touchpaper and stand back.
Bowie and Ron (a sad-eyed trier) eventually bond over Iggy and the Stooges in that American forcing house - the car - how else? And Ron keeps trying for a Rolling Stones interview. Back in New York chasing the interviewer (they miss him of course) he meets Warhol (is it Holly Woodlawn on the door?). Warhol just films him doing mime but fancies Bowie's shoes, well, he's just finished making Trash the previous year. A concert with the Velvet Underground softens the disappointment and Bowie has a full-on musician's discussion with Lou Reed. Not Lou Reed? It doesn't matter. New York is subtly teaching him that you don't have to be real to be authentic. And Ron's Iggy story - "he doesn't care" - carries weight too.
The worst and final interview happens, coked out of his head in LA, where Bowie seemingly ditzes that interview with Rolling Stone. But if you listen carefully, he is laying out the roadmap for the future - David Bowie is the image and David Jones is me. Music is the mask., I am the message. But he retreats into himself and refuses to engage when asked what the message is. It's a significant moment. There's a crisis of confidence and a possible thought of suicide but then Ron says if you can't be yourself, be someone else. He barely registers at the time.
After he returns home to London he's starting to work (Hunky Dory is beginning to come to him) and Angie's not happy. Finally, he's thrown off the dress, that may be why.
A time lapse, he's come up for air, forced the band into onesies, makeup, the full catastrophe, dropped Mercury for RCA, found his inner alien and now emerges reborn - strides out on stage with those gangling legs, that androgynous costume and the full macquillage - Ziggy with his men from Mars. General triumph.
And we're done. Well, not quite.
The end credits - Ziggy giving his all to My Death Waits like an old Roué. And that's well worth waiting for.
If I haven't made it clear how brilliant Johnny Flynn is in inhabiting David Bowie then I'll say it loud - this is a performance to treasure.
Afterthoughts
Understandably Duncan Jones doesn't want the public ferreting around the psychosexual politics of his parents' marriage (who would - Martin Amis being the exception that proves the rule?) but Stardust does tread relatively discreetly.
"In British pop, it was Bowie and Bryan Ferry ... who came up with the idea that you weren't just a singer acting out your life, or a fan imitating a singer acting out his life, but could - singer and fan - be haunted by a persona." - Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books, 8th October 2020. I take this as a classic instance of morphic resonance.
Utopia Avenue, the 2020 novel by David Mitchell brings in a fictionalised David Bowie as a recurring if not central character. Clearly Bowie is no longer an individual. He is now an icon, happening right now.
The film's tight budget really works in a positive way to create the appropriate look for the story.
Lindsay Kemp taught mime to Bowie, Kate Bush and Viv Stanshall among others in the early seventies.
Buy the soundtrack - well worth it. Johnny Flynn locates a remarkable intimation of where Bowie's voice was coming from and going to. And there are some great musical choices.
Review of Stardust
