Twenty-five years before director Todd Haynes (rightfully) gained a lot of attention for his true crime-influenced melodrama May December, he released an audacious glam-rock drama that was at its core David Bowie and Iggy Pop fanfiction delivered through a Citizen Kane-esque framing device. That film was Velvet Goldmine, which somehow still feels as rebellious and revelatory today as it did in 1998. It’s a bisexual masterpiece, complete with tons of queer characters, a glitter-covered Ewan McGregor gyrating nude, and even Mother herself Toni Collette doing a bit of riffing about her perineum. And that’s not even getting into the soundtrack, which saw some of the biggest names in British alt-rock create fake supergroups for the film’s two onscreen bands. What’s not to love?
It’s hard to deny Velvet Goldmine’s queer status, as it follows reporter Arthur (Christian Bale) as he tries to investigate the faked death of 1970s British pop star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), remembering his own journey of sexual discovery at the time, spurred on by Slade’s music. At one point he remembers seeing Slade on TV talking about sexuality, and he points and jumps up and down, shouting at his parents, “that’s me!” It’s hard not to immediately identify with this ruddy-faced youth, exuberant that someone out in the world feels an attraction that’s outside of gender norms. Slade even announces to the press that “everybody knows most people are bisexual,” and explains that he and his wife Mandy (Collette) feel the same way so there’s no issue. This does not impress more conservative members of the press or Arthur’s parents, but it rockets Slade to glam-rock superstardom as his alter-ego, Maxwell Demon. (Just think of Demon as the Ziggy Stardust to Slade’s Bowie.) Then he meets out-of-control Iggy Pop-analogue Curt Wild (McGregor) and falls in lusty love, which spells the beginning of the end.
All of that’s pretty fabulously queer, but then Haynes gave his story a fantastical, supernatural element that’s a kind of wish fulfillment, making The Portrait of Dorian Gray author Oscar Wilde the recipient of extraterrestrial magic in the form of a stone brooch. The brooch is passed from queer artist to queer artist, helping them to share themselves with the world, until it’s stolen by Slade just prior to his ascension to fame. Velvet Goldmine doesn’t just give us a peek into the life of a queer rock god, it also creates its own fabulous queer mythology. It’s not all roses and love songs, though, as we also see the darker side of rock ‘n’ roll excess and the challenges of being authentic to yourself in a homophobic, puritanical world. The latter can be painful, like when Arthur is forced to leave home after his father discovers him masturbating to one of Slade’s albums, but it does make the movie feel more lived-in and authentic.
Just as Haynes uses the elements of melodrama to make May December’s reality feel both heightened and grounded at the same time, he uses the trappings of glam rock to tell a story both deeply specific and utterly universal in Velvet Goldmine. Other than the possibly unknowable Slade, who only really exists through the way the other characters remember him, the characters are wonderfully human. They’re not caricatures of the men and women they’re supposed to represent, especially not Arthur, who remains incredibly relatable from beginning to end. Whether he’s trying not to smudge his eyeliner while first learning to put on makeup or staring at his computer screen dejectedly in his crummy journalist-salary apartment, Arthur is exceptionally vulnerable for a character that basically serves as an audience surrogate, especially when compared to the people around him who are mostly Slade’s jaded emotional collateral. It’s hard to blame any of them for being burnt out by rock excess, however, and we see moments of their humanity, especially when Wild and Arthur have a romantic rooftop romp of their own.
Each of these characters is a fully formed person whose bisexuality is integral to who they are without defining them, something that’s still often rarely seen on-screen more than two decades later. Velvet Goldmine’s depiction of sexuality feels especially bold now, as it’s depicted and discussed explicitly in a way that would launch a thousand thinkpieces if it were released in 2023. These characters aren’t just bisexual, they say the word bisexual! Often sexuality is reduced to the binary of “gay” or “straight,” erasing bisexual identities, and to not only see it represented by such a variety of fascinating characters but to actually hear it spoken aloud is deeply validating.
Velvet Goldmine begins with a voiceover about Wilde and the young Jack Fairy, whom Slade will one day steal the brooch from. After Fairy is beaten by some bullies, he stands before a mirror and uses the blood on his lip to rouge them, then smiles as the voiceover explains, “Until one mysterious day, when Jack would discover that somewhere there were others …quite like him. Singled out for a great gift. And one day… the whole stinking world… would be theirs.” When it ends, in the 1990s of the film’s present-day, it’s clear that those days either came and went with the glam-rock era, or they have yet to truly come to pass. The final sequence is of queer couples throughout the U.K. as a cover of one of Slade’s songs plays, hinting at the idea that the best for LGBTQ people is still yet to come. Twenty-five years later, we have seen improvements and setbacks both for queer folks, but that hope still feels incredibly vital to hang onto.
