Velvet Goldmine

Velvet Goldmine - 1998 | 119 mins | Drama | Colour

The Production Team

Director: Todd Haynes.
Producer: Christine Vachon.
Script: Todd Haynes and James Lyons.
Cinematography: Maryse Alberti.
Editing: James Lyons.
Art Direction: Andrew Munro.
Production Design: Christopher Hobbs.
Costume Design: Sandy Powell.
Make-up Department: Peter King.
Sound: Peter Lindsay, Eliza Paley and Paul P. Soucek.
Original Music: Carter Burwell and Radiohead.

The Cast

Ewan McGregor f - Curt Wild
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers f - Brian Slade
Christian Bale f - Arthur Stuart
Toni Collette f - Mandy Slade
Eddie Izzard f - Jerry Devine
Emily Woof - Shannon

Plot Synopsis

Writer-director Todd Haynes has created an original and visually stunning faux documentary charting the rise and fall of a fictional glam-rock star – using David Bowie as a role model.

Starting out with a reference to the poet Oscar Wilde, Velvet Goldmine is set mostly in Britain at the height of the 1970s Glam Rock era, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) takes the charts by storm. Slade is involved in a unique love triangle; married to an American woman named Mandy (Toni Collette) but having an affair with a rising rock star named Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who is so original onstage that he upstages Slade. Unable to cope with the fame and fortune, he fakes his own death onstage. When his fans find out it was a hoax he is finished, his drug use increases, his record sales plummet, and so he disappears from view.

Years later on the 10th anniversary of Slade’s faked death, a journalist named Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale is asked to investigate the Brian Slade phenomenon, the film then examines Brian's life in a series of flashbacks and shock revelations.