'Velvet Goldmine' — Shudder to Think! — turns 25

Todd Haynes’ misunderstood 1998 glam-rock homage was a fictionalized pseudo-biopic of David Bowie, one that featured fake Bowie songs that were somehow great.

In October of 1998 — 25 years ago this week — director Todd Haynes released Velvet Goldmine, his elaborate and clearly very personal homage to the glam rock era. It featured a narrative structure borrowed from Citizen Kane, and rock stars very clearly inspired by David Bowie and Iggy Pop (with a touch of Lou Reed too) who have a chaotic affair with one another. 

The film followed a trajectory familiar from that particular decade- it flopped upon release but has since been rediscovered by audiences. 

Velvet Goldmine’s framing device has journalist Arthur (Christian Bale, not long before American Psycho), in 1984, trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, playing the Bowie stand-in.) Slade, in 1974, had faked his own death during a concert and disappeared. 

The story goes through Slade’s rise and fall, including his sexual and musical collaboration with Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), an American rock star with no reservations about getting naked on stage (Later in the film, he’s customed much like another rock star with the same first name, Cobain, and that’s likely not an accident.)

The period look is fantastic, as are the fashions, and the film has a dreamy look throughout. The smart screenplay begins and ends with references to Oscar Wilde, with others sprinkled throughout. 

Throughout, we get a tour of the glam rock scenes of the U.S. and U.K. in the first half of the 1970s. And plenty of very, very good songs. 

Velvet Goldmine is named for a song by David Bowie, although Bowie neglected to endorse or participate in the film, and did not grant the use of his music. So Haynes and his team did the next-best thing: In addition to plenty of era-specific covers, they commissioned new songs, meant to sound like approximations of glam rock hits from the time by Bowie and others. 

They put together a “supergroup” called the Venus in Furs (including Radiohead’s Thor Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, the latter of whom would later become a major film composer) to do some to the tunes, most of which were Roxy Music covers, and also used established groups, like the underrated 1990s band Shudder to Think, to write originals. 

There were some covers, like the Venus and Furs’ fantastic take on Roxy Music’s “2HB” that closes the film, and also some classics like Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love.” 

I’m not going to say Velvet Goldmine is a better movie than Almost Famous, which arrived about two years later; the two movies have very different objectives and goals. But there’s no doubt that the original songs in Velvet Goldmine are much better. 

Velvet Goldmine was one of many films in the 1990s that Harvey Weinstein effectively sabotaged. The then-Miramax head clashed with Haynes, as he did with so many talented filmmakers, over the final cut, and ultimately didn’t give the film the support it deserved. It barely made a blip at the box office, and its only Oscar nomination was for Best Costume Design. 

This was, to be clear, far from the worst thing Harvey Weinstein did in those years. But the disgraced mogul’s bullying behavior towards filmmakers, often combined with scatological insults, was the first reason he emerged as a villain in the public eye. 

The film, in the years since, has been reclaimed by some fans, many of them queer, as a misunderstood masterpiece. Indeed, the film is very much about the sexual awakening of Bale’s journalist character, through that era of music.

In Haynes’ filmography, Velvet Goldmine was his third feature and the first after the acclaimed Safe from 1995. Four years later came his Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven and then, five years after that, was I’m Not There, another biopic of a music legend (in this case, Bob Dylan) which was much weirder than Velvet Goldmine but was produced with Dylan’s cooperation. 

Of late, Haynes has directed the acclaimed Carol, the very underrated Wonderstruck, and the earnest but above-average legal drama Dark Waters. He would return to the rock of Velvet Goldmine — as well as Lou Reed, and the word “Velvet” —  with the astonishing documentary The Velvet Underground, which is the only movie of the last ten years in which I watched it for the first time, and then immediately watched it again. His next film, May/December, debuted to positive festival feedback and arrives on Netflix next month. 

Velvet Goldmine is available on all major VOD platforms and is very much deserving of rediscovery.