‘Stardust’: Can you make a David Bowie biopic without his music?
Urgh. There is a boatload of annoying things about the David Bowie biopic Stardust, but chief among all of them is that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s actually not a terrible idea for a movie.
I say that, there’s an argument to be made that trying to be the story of David Bowie on screen is a fool’s errand in the first place, and I don’t think I can argue with that. The whole point of the music biopic is to take a legendary figure and make them down to earth and relatable, and who would want that from the actual David Bowie?! The great dame of glam, the thin white duke, Ziggy Shtupping Stardust himself, and we want to bring him down to our level, are we certifiable?!
Well, we are, and the fact is that he has name recognition, so it was only a matter of time before someone tried to turn his story into a biopic, and if we were going to get one, Stardust wasn’t actually that bad of an idea. It’s not a womb-to-tomb effort like Ray, Walk the Line or the execrable Bohemian Rhapsody, it picks a single, important part of Bowie’s story and dramatises it. In this case, the failure of the Hunky Dory and the US tour that Bowie was forced onto, where, in his one last shot at stardom, he conceptualises and writes the Ziggy Stardust album.
Admit it, that’s a good idea for a film. You get the right actor to play Bowie. You get an up-and-coming actress with momentum to play Angie waiting at home. You get some moustache-twirling character actor to play the suit telling Bowie that “a concept album about a gay alien rock star?! You’re insane, David, it’ll never work!” Some sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, a big scene where, in the depths of his despair, Bowie stumbles upon the words “spiders from mars” before shrugging them off like “nah, that’s shit.”
Admit it, there’s some juice there. Combine that with creatively shot performances of Bowie classics, and there’s your ‘Best Actor’ nomination right there, job done. They do have some Bowie classics in there, right? Right?!
They did not have some Bowie classics in there
Yeah. So. The Bowie estate is extremely picky about who uses his legendary songs, and infamously, they are about as likely to authorise his music for a biopic as they are a conversion therapy clinic. My theory here is that the producers sold a bunch of people on making this film by convincing them that somehow, they could get the rights to Bowie’s music. Thus, a bunch of people signed off on the film and green-lit it before the Bowie estate came back to them and said no.
Suddenly, the producers of the film were left holding their dicks. They’d been given a boatload of cash they needed to make back, to make a film no one wanted to be in, about an album whose songs they couldn’t use. Not exactly an enviable place to be in, and in a way, credit to them for not defaulting on the whole thing and actually making the film at all. Every film is a miracle, and in a strange way, Stardust is too. A credit to the sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness of sleeping in your own bed even when you’ve shat in it.
And boy-oh-boy had they. Even putting aside the fact that the film is about music that they can’t use, Stardust is bad. Johnny Flynn is so horribly miscast that the only thing more catastrophic than his fuck-ass wigs is his genuinely laughable attempt at Bowie’s Brixton accent. Marc Maron is so checked out, you can hear the dial tone click at the end of each scene. Jena Malone is given absolutely nothing to do. It seems that the production’s only good idea was keeping it focused on one part of Bowie’s life, and it’s all downhill from here.
You can’t even just sit back and enjoy the tunes. They’re not bloody there!