Films Stardust, Sound Of Metal

Pre-Ziggy Bowie, unevenly portrayed; going deaf for heavy metal; a massacre in the USSR and more…

TARDUST Be wary when a flm

Sbegins with a caption telling you that follows is “(mostly) fction”. 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 bafe and alienate everyone from American customs ofcials – “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 flm 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 signifcant 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 of 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 flm founders too when tackling Bowie’s relationship with his disturbed brother Terry (Derek Moran), presented as the key infuence on his decision to “be someone else” – something that pays of 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 flm sufers 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 fippant 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 flm somewhat goes of the boil, in a Belgian-set coda.

Acute in its understanding of human fallibility and, one would imagine, deaf identity, the flm 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 Jeferson Kyle Kidd, a former Civil War soldier who now travels around giving readings from the current

STARDUST

Directed by Gabriel Range Starring Johnny Flynn, Marc Maron Opens January 15 Cert TBC 6/10 SOUND OF METAL

Directed by Darius Marder Starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke Opens January 29 Cert 15 8/10 REVIEWED THIS MONTH

NEWS OF THE WORLD

Directed by Paul Greengrass Starring Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel Streaming from TBC Cert PG 6/10 ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI

Directed by Regina King Starring Kingsley Ben-Adir, Aldis Hodge Streamingfrom January 15 Cert 15 7/10 DEAR COMRADES!

Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky Starring Yulia Vysotskaya, Vladislav Komarov Opens January 15 Cert TBC 8/10

newspapers. One day, he fnds himself rescuing Johanna (Helena Zengel), a German orphan abducted by Native Americans, who now only speaks the Kiowa language. When the authorities prove indiferent, Kidd decides to escort her home, wherever that may be.

The flm continues a latterday cycle of westerns about elderly men having a redemptive experience late in their lives: Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Tommy Lee Jones in The Homesman, Jef Bridges in the Coens’ True Grit and Sam Shepard in Blackthorn. But the stakes don’t feel high here since Hanks, being Hanks, plays a man who’s decent from the start and remains decent throughout. While the question of Johanna’s true identity, European or Native American, echoes The Searchers, other themes struggle to emerge: the flm gives little resonance to the device of Kidd’s newsreading, while the use of a robber baron character (played by imposing scowler Thomas Francis Murphy) barely generates the resonance it might have had in these latter days of Trump.

Twelve-year-old Zengel is intriguingly, sometimes opaquely solemn, while Hanks is tender and careworn as few modern male stars know how to be. Dariusz Wolski’s photography is impeccable, in something of a post-Heaven’s Gate vein (good on mud, rain and murky lamplight). But there are few surprises and little tension. Greengrass eschews his usual kinetic intensity, but seems a little awed by old-school western tradition, resulting in something too glumly reverent to bring new life to the genre.

ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI The aim of One Night In Miami is to put you, as they say in Hamilton, in the room where it happened. In February 1964, four African-American legends met in a Miami hotel

The film suffers from being denied the use of any Bowie songs

room –Malcolm X, Cassius Clay (yet to become Muhammad Ali), Sam Cooke and Jim Brown. Largely a chamber piece, One Night… is based on a 2013 stage play by Kemp Powers, and elegantly helmed by actor-director Regina King – who recently dazzled in front of the camera in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk.

Following Clay’s championship win against Sonny Liston, Malcolm X has summoned the other three to celebrate, although at frst they are none too enthusiastic about his insistence on sober refection. What follows is unashamedly theatrical, and all the more efective for it, highlighting the crises on each man’s mind – notably Clay’s conversion to Islam and Cooke’s agonising over his purpose as an artist. While the script sometimes lays out the issues of the civil rights struggle in bold type, a discreetly handled visual gloss captures the glamour and social tension of the period, while the performances are magnifcent. Kingsley Ben-Adir is by turns severe and genial as Malcolm; Eli Goree vividly summons Clay’s inspired exuberance; Aldis Hodge makes Brown a measured foil, one sceptical eyebrow raised; and as Cooke, Leslie Odum Jr captures the uncertainty of an established star who has all the rewards but is still seeking purpose. It’s no spoiler to say that when Odum fnally gives us Cooke’s rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come”, no throat will be lef without a lump.

DEAR COMRADES! Russian auteur Andrei Konchalovsky has had one of cinema’s stranger careers – from co-writing Tarkovsky’s for-theages masterpiece Andrei Rublev to directing Stallone in Tango And Cash. Of late, he has been on surer ground back home – in this case, back in the USSR, since Dear Comrades! is set in the Khrushchev era. The flm recounts a grim Soviet episode, the Novocherkassk massacre of 1962, in which several factory workers were shot following a labour strike. Yulia Vysotskaya plays Lyuda, a dedicated local Party ofcial but also a somewhat disillusioned nostalgist for the ‘glory days’ of Stalin’s reign. She fnds herself questioning her certainties when the army and the KGB move in to quash the unrest.

It’s never easy to gauge exactly how modern Russian cinema relates to contemporary politics, especially when tackling the past. But whatever subtexts it may carry, Dear Comrades! is superb cinema, showing the chaos gradually mounting despite – then because of – the ofcial attempts to control it. Vysotskaya is terrifc, crackling with anxiety and conficted determination. Andrei Naidenov’s detached, luminous blackand-white photography makes you feel you’re watching a Soviet flm of the early ’60s, but tellingly fltered through several decades’ worth of retrospective knowledge.

Reverend Martin Luther King at the FBI, 1964

ALSO OUT...

MLK/FBI

OPENS JANUARY 15 Sam Pollard’s revealing documentary lifts the lid off J Edgar Hoover’s dirty ops campaign against Dr Martin Luther King.

QUO VADIS, AIDA?

OPENS JANUARY 22 Directed by Jasmila Zbanic, Bosnia’s Oscars entry features a galvanizing performance from Jasna Duricic as a UN translator trying to save her family in Srebrenica in 1995.

BABY DONE

OPENS JANUARY 22 Taika Waititi-produced New Zealand comedy starring stand-up Rose Matafeo as a tree surgeon in crisis over the prospect of motherhood.

SYNCHRONIC

OPENS JANUARY 29 Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan discover the pros and cons of a time travel drug in this sci-fi drama from genre specialists Benson and Moorhead.

ASSASSINS

OPENS JANUARY 29 Mind-boggling documentary about two young women who were tried for killing the brother of North Korean leader Kim Jung-un – except they claimed they were taking part in a TV prank show.

THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS

OPENS FEBRUARY 5 Exuberantly eccentric documentary exec-produced by Luca Guadagnino, about men, their dogs and their shared passion for scouring Italy’s forests in search of nature’s aromatic nuggets.

SLALOM

OPENS FEBRUARY 12 Striking French debut from Charlène Favier, about a 15-year-old skier (Noée Abita) experiencing a world of pressure, exploitation and abuse.