Stardust

★★★

Dir: Gabriel Range VERTIGO. C/ST

Bowie biopic with no Bowie music makes the grade, just.

Is Stardust as bad as they’re saying? Spoiler alert: it’s not. In fact, it’s not a great deal less good than Bohemian Rhapsody – another gaudy panto of rock’n’roll fantasy and reality, rife with bad wigs but redeemed by a fine central performance. Johnny Flynn’s Bowie is in his post-TMWSTW dip: starved of success; preoccupied with his brother Terry’s madness and his struggle to balance artistic authenticity and his penchant for mime. Flynn has Bowie’s seductiveness to a ‘t’ (there are sideways glances that make you catch your breath: “It’s him!”) but the script is heavyhanded with its themes and you feel a film that embraced its unauthorisedness more fully could have been weirder, more true to Bowie’s art. The score – by Ann Nikitin, weaving in as many Bowie echoes as legal formulae will allow – is actually interesting, but the real stars are Flynn’s Bowie teeth. They’re uncanny.