STARDUST

★★ OUT 15 JANUARY / CERT TBC / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Gabriel Range CAST Johnny Flynn, Jena Malone, Marc Maron

David Bowie never even gave permission for a written biography of his life, let alone a cinematic biopic, so Stardust inevitably arrives under a cloud of unauthorised controversy. As Bowie, Johnny Flynn seems like smart casting on paper: in films like Beast, he has shown a kind of extra-terrestrial charisma, and in his other career as a folk singer, he has proven musical chops. But he feels miscast here, too distant from Bowie’s slight, androgynous frame and lumbered with a script that clumsily attempts to grapple with Bowie’s endless ch-ch-changes. For a film about such a famously imaginative artist, it feels curiously flat, and suffers badly from the total absence of his back catalogue; watching this, you’d think Bowie was merely a middling covers singer with a penchant for terrible mimes.