Pre-Ziggy Bowie, unevenly portrayed; going deaf for heavy metal; a massacre in the USSR and more…
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TARDUST Be wary when a film begins with a caption telling you that follows is “(mostly) fiction”. Let’s say then that Gabriel Range’s Stardust is ‘mostly’ a biopic of pre-Ziggy David Bowie, plus a certain amount of fancy. It’s 1971, and a surprisingly naive Bowie (Johnny Flynn) arrives in America for a promotional tour. His host and driver is publicist Ron Oberman (Marc Maron), seemingly his only ally at Mercury Records. From the start, the singer manages to baffle and alienate everyone from American customs officials – “It’s a man’s dress,” he explains – to DJs and journalists aggrieved at his awkward interview style. Stardust – not to be confused with a certain 1974 film that put to rest some of the hollower illusions of pop fame – plays its ironies archly. The main joke is that no-one wants to know this oddball who, a year on, would become a significant force in popular music. The late Ron Oberman – who went on to become a major player in the US music industry – is represented as being as much a nebbish as Bowie, his clapped-out car littered with his divorce papers. But he proves empathetic and supportive – and Maron gives him a nicely hard-boiled edge of wiseacre sanity. Johnny Flynn, even in period tresses, looks nothing like Bowie, yet carries him off rather adroitly, playing up the polite Anglo-hippie gaucheness, and making amusing use of his bibbity-bobbity hat. Conversely Jena Malone struggles, dealt the dud card of an Angie Bowie who’s sourly unsympathetic to the point of parody. The script creaks – “Who are you, David, as an artist?” snipes manager Tony Defries. “A spaceman? A madman? A laughing dwarf?” (sic). The film flounders too when tackling Bowie’s relationship with his disturbed brother Terry (Derek Moran), presented as the key influence on his decision to “be someone else” – something that pays off in a climactic Ziggy performance, complete with appallingly dodgy wig. Somewhat cheap and cheerful in
“He could leave ’em to hang…”: Johnny Flynn as Bowie in Stardust
execution – although that arguably lends it a persuasively early-’70s tone – the film suffers from being denied the use of any Bowie songs. Flynn contributes a dog’s dinner of a Velvet Underground pastiche, although he’s pretty credible performing Bowie’s Jacques Brel covers. An uncomfortable mix of flippant and crashingly earnest, Stardust nevertheless doesn’t ruinously dishonour its subject. SOUND OF METAL When rockers boast about living dangerously, their insurers know what they’re really talking about – the risk of wrecking their hearing. In Darius Marder’s Sound Of Metal, Riz Ahmed stars as Ruben, who plays drums in an American noise duo alongside his singer-guitarist girlfriend (Olivia Cooke). One day on tour, his hearing suddenly goes – and stays gone. Ruben checks in at a centre run by counsellor Joe (Paul Daci); he becomes a part of Joe’s deaf community, and gradually learns to let go, communicate and contribute. But he can’t help looking to the past, which is where the film somewhat goes off the boil, in a Belgian-set coda.
Acute in its understanding of human fallibility and, one would imagine, deaf identity, the film has an authentic ring, not least in its evocation of life on the American fringe-metal circuit. It also owes much to the charismatically honest performance by Daci (an actor who in real life has a side gig fronting a sign language Black Sabbath tribute band). Ahmed, with his wonderfully eloquent air of vulnerable hyper-alertness, gives his second superb performance of the year as a man in crisis, following Mogul Mowgli. Sound Of Metal operates on a rare level of subtlety and emotional depth – not least because of Nicolas Becker’s densely layered sound design, merging noise, silence and a certain submarine ambience that’s dense and deep as deafness itself. NEWS OF THE WORLD Unlike the late unlamented tabloid, Paul Greengrass’s News Of The World is a determinedly non-racy proposition. Set in 1870s Texas, it stars Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a former Civil War soldier who now travels around giving readings from the current
REVIEWED THIS MONTH STARDUST Directed by Gabriel Range Starring Johnny Flynn, Marc Maron Opens January 15 Cert TBC
6/10
SOUND OF METAL
NEWS OF THE WORLD
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI
DEAR COMRADES!
Directed by Darius Marder Starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke Opens January 29 Cert 15
Directed by Paul Greengrass Starring Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel Streaming from TBC Cert PG
Directed by Regina King Starring Kingsley Ben-Adir, Aldis Hodge Streaming from January 15 Cert 15
6/10
7/10
Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky Starring Yulia Vysotskaya, Vladislav Komarov Opens January 15 Cert TBC
8/10
8/10 110 • UNCUT • MARCH 2021
