From Velvet Goldmine to Sound of Metal, the rock’n’roll life has provided a rich seam for cinema
It can be hard for cinema to convey the body-shaking rush of rock’n’roll. There’s something fundamentally different about the performative nature of the rock star and the actor – one possessed and in the moment, the other considered and artfully observed – that can make attempts by the latter to play the former ring strangely false. The charge of live music, meanwhile, doesn’t always penetrate the essential remove imposed by the camera.
Two recent films about rock musicians demonstrate the potential pitfalls and rarer rewards of portraying that scene on screen – both are out on non-premium VOD and DVD this week. Stardust, an anaemic biopic of David Bowie, is the dud. Hamstrung by the failure to secure rights to any of its subject’s actual music, Gabriel Range’s dramatisation of Bowie’s disastrous first US tour, it wastes a pretty valiant attempt by Johnny Flynn to channel the young star’s gangly magnetism on a script that’s all corny name-dropping surface, with little interior investigation. (Cracked Actor, the BBC’s hour-long 1975 documentary about Bowie on tour the year before, renders Range’s drama pointless. It can be found on YouTube in variously fuzzy forms.)
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