Mark Reviews Movies: STARDUST (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 24, 2020

A movie about David Bowie without any Bowie songs is a dreadful enough thought. One wonders how the arrangement that resulted in Stardust came to be. Were the filmmakers hoping they'd be able to use Bowie's music as the backbone for a story about a young Bowie, only to be forced to re-configure the entire story around some other part of his life when they couldn't secure the rights? Did screenwriters Christopher Bell and director Gabriel Range know they wouldn't be able to use Bowie's music, meaning they intentionally found a specific period of the musician's career when the music wouldn't need to be prominent?

Speculation can only get one so far, but either option here seems reasonable. There's a certain pettiness to the resulting movie, though. If they can't use Bowie's music, the filmmakers will focus on the man, and because they can't have his music, Bell and Range seem to go out of their way to transform the man into an insecure, terrified, confused, uncertain, and likely and literally insane individual. The movie tells a story, sure, but it definitely isn't Bowie's or, for that matter, even a passable one of any kind.

The primary thrust of this tale, dubbed "(mostly) fiction" by some opening text, involves Bowie's first tour of the United States in 1971, which, due to some legal issues, couldn't include any concerts or on-air performances. It becomes a publicity tour for his third album The Man Who Sold the World, a departure from the more folk-like rock of his hit song "Space Oddity," which means that the record isn't selling that well.

David (a bland Johnny Flynn, although, considering how poorly this character is treated and presented, it's not entirely his fault) gets all the bad news from his manager Tony Defries (Julian Richings) in a cumbersomely written scene of non-stop exposition. David flies to the States, leaving his wife Angie (Jena Malone) in London (where she suddenly is very pregnant about halfway through the movie), and everything goes wrong from there. He's accosted by immigration and customs officials, who insult him for having packed a dress, and local studio publicist Ron Oberman (Marc Maron) gives him the worse news: This publicity tour is going to be improvised, mostly out of Ron's station wagon.

There are some intriguing questions posed by this premise. Is it possible to separate the artist from his or her art? Does Bowie matter if he isn't singing and playing his own songs, and if so, how does he matter?

Bell and Range have no answers to any of these, because they neither try nor really care about Bowie, his artistry, or what kind of person he actually was. Indeed, the movie's David doesn't appear to have a clue about himself, his art, or why he does some of the things he does. He just goes along for the ride, making odd and contradictory statements about music and himself in a few interviews, while being haunted by memories of his half-brother Terry (Derek Moran), who is currently in an asylum to treat schizophrenia.

The most insulting thing about this movie is how it frames Bowie and everything about him as either the fear of or the reality of him suffering from mental health issues akin to Terry. That's this movie's conclusion. Bowie didn't simply play with his identity, creating characters such as the Ziggy Stardust whose appearance serves as this story's climax, for the purposes of art. No, he possessed some psychological disorder, which also, one assumes the filmmaker's are intentionally or accidentally proposing, accounts for his embrace of an androgynous persona and life.

In this movie, David is, at first, possibly and, later, certainly suffering from some mental health issues—visions, delusions, paranoia, crises of identity. It would be one thing if the filmmakers attempted to simplify an artist as complex as Bowie by a single, defining trait or event in his life. For them to exploit mental illness as that defining thing (based here only on the circumstantial evidence of Bowie's family and the content of some of his songs), though, is a slight to the real man. More broadly, it presents a disconcerting, backwards view of mental health issues in order to add drama, because the filmmakers were simply too lazy to find any real kind.

All of this happened because the filmmakers couldn't use Bowie's music. Stardust, then, is either spiteful or wholly wrongheaded, but at least the music isn't tarnished by its association with this mess.

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