Stardust

There are many thing wrong with this film. The most obvious one being the failure of the producers to secure the rights to Bowie's music for a film about Bowie's music. The second issue is that the story is in accurate. The film implies that until Bowie invented Ziggy he was a failure in the US until the Spiders from Mars album was out. This is false. Before Ziggy and after TMWSTW Bowie released an album called Hunky Dory which had a US hit called Changes, an FM staple called Life on Mars, and a song that changed rock and roll, called Queen B*tch. The riff of Queen B*tch is maybe the most copied riff since Chuck Berry, especially by punk and new wave bands. So the fact that this film pretends this album never existed to serve some made up story is dishonest

Third mistake is having a 60 year old Marc Marin playing a 39 years old is very distracting.

Like an artist constrained to not use black and white in a painting the film's director has not used the music of it's heroic subject and just as the use of black and white is not necessary to make a painting so has the director found a way to make a film about a moment in Bowie's life without his music. Certainly we can harbor fantasies of a film where verisimilitude overwhelms us and all our rocknroll memories explode on screen. This is not that sort of film. So sorry for your loss. Stardust is a story of an apotheosis and one that did not come easily. Bowie was ignored by many in the early 70's including his record label. Many familiar characters spill across the screen and while you might gripe at Bolan or groan at Angie, Johnny Flynn's David Jones/Bowie is at times eerie as he emulates the shapes and features we associate with the man who sold the world. Not a perfect movie but Bowie came alive here at a time when still miss him. When Bowie played John Merrick on Broadway he wore no makeup and made no attempt to look like the famous Elephant Man and yet still carried the part to great acclaim. Kudos to director Gabriel Range for his choice of musician, somewhat acclaimed, Johnny Flynn to lead this thoughtful semi fictional look at where a Jones became a Bowie.

How can you have a David Bowie Biopic, and not have any of his music in the film?

Sure, there's none of Bowie's music here, so if that's why you may want to watch it, don't bother. Once you're past that, it's a pretty engaging little film - Flynn is great (and we all know he really can sing; the Brel stuff is fabulous) and Marc Maron turned in a great performance.

Terrible movie, Marc Bolan is a 60 year old woman in a black curly wig, Bowie looks like Noel Fielding's resurrected zombie twin. We couldn't watch it, turned it off about one third the way through, just dreadful.