Stardust (2020)

An intertitle at the beginning of Stardust (2020) warns us that what we are about to see is “(mostly) fiction.” When it comes to biopics, such a disclaimer is superfluous. This redundant transparency from co-writer/director Gabriel Range does raise a question. What can we learn from a movie about David Bowie that contains nothing Bowie ever said or did, nothing that ever happened to him, and no music he ever composed?

Stardust focuses on Bowie's first US tour in 1971. It plays out like a bastard offspring of This Is Spinal Tap and Green Book. The film has Bowie (Johnny Flynn) perform some obscure cover in front of an audience of vacuum cleaner salesmen. Like anyone watching this movie, they couldn't care less.

Flynn-Bowie spends too much time in the back seat of a car. He is driven around by Ron Oberman (Marc Maron), his American publicist. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, they are not.

Bowie, one of the most intelligent, creative, and influential artists in music history, is reduced here to a babbling, insecure idiot desperate for attention whose only excuse for wearing a dress is that his wife Angie (Jena Malone) is the one who wears the pants. The alien that Bowie played in The Man Who Fell to Earth has more in common with him than Flynn’s caricature.

To no one's surprise, Bowie's estate did not approve of the film and did not grant rights to use his music. Instead, Stardust shows Bowie performing covers that the real Bowie played in this period, such as The Yardbirds' “I Wish You Would,” and Jacques Brel's “My Death.” A bonus track, for want of a better term, comes in the form a Bowiesque song written by Flynn, whose ego apparently knows no bounds.

Thus, Stardust is deprived of the only thing that could have made it bearable. Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman are not good movies, but at least you can enjoy their soundtracks. Stardust can't even boast that lone saving grace.

Range deals with this hurdle by giving Bowie a tourist visa instead of a work one. According to Oberman, this means Bowie can't do concerts, only interviews. This presents two problems. First, Oberman finds a technicality so that Bowie can appear at "private parties," but the character would have been better off not singing at all.

The second problem is that when the protagonist is not singing, he's talking. When he talks, he doesn't have anything smart, interesting, or amusing to say. The exception is when he explains the definition of "posterity" to Angie, and even that comes across as sub-Spinal Tap material.

All of the above notwithstanding, Stardust loves name-dropping Bowie song titles — especially "Space Oddity," "The Man Who Sold the World," and "All the Madmen." Since the lyrics and music to these masterpieces are off limits, we’re not treated to any kind of insight into how they were written in the first place.

The film fails to shed light on Bowie as either a person or an artist. It may be titled after the Ziggy Stardust persona, but its hollow depiction of the protagonist has a lot more in common with the bloodless Thin White Duke.