‘Velvet Goldmine’ 20th Anniversary: Still the Best and Most Timeless Queer Film of Its Era

Over the course of the last three decades, it’s been fair to say that Todd Haynes is as elite a queer filmmaker as we have. From his experimental days making films like Poison and the notoriously hard-to-find Superstar (which told the Karen Carpenter story through Barbie-doll puppetry) to his collaborations with Julianne Moore on films like [safe] and Far From Heaven, to the ravishing and widely lauded Carol, Haynes has covered everything from camp to melodrama to a gender-bending Bob Dylan. But only once has Haynes ever aimed so direct a bullseye at the queering of popular culture as he did in the 1998 glam-and-glitter spectacle Velvet Goldmine. As the film celebrates the 20th anniversary of its U.S. release — turning just about the right age for the bisexual experimentation and cross-dressing provocations that consume so much of the movie’s aesthetic — a moment or two should be taken to appreciate a movie that has never fully gotten its due as a major step forward in queer filmmaking and in telling our own story on screen.

The story of Velvet Goldmine, in its most direct encapsulation, is the story of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Myers), an enigmatic British rock star at the forefront of the glam movement of the 1970s. Based none too subtly on David Bowie, even though Bowie ultimately disapproved of the movie and wouldn’t allow his music to be licensed for use in the film, Slade adopts the persona of the Ziggy Stardust-esque “Maxwell Demon.” After attaining a massive level of fame and attention all over the world, Slade faked his death and disappeared. Christian Bale plays a journalist who pursues the real story behind Slade’s disappearance, motivated by the fact that he was a young queer kid who grew up idolizing and lusting after Slade and his contemporaries. In a Citizen Kane-esque quest, Bale’s character interviews the people from Slade’s life, including his former manager (Eddie Izzard), his ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette), and American glam/punk star Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), based on a blend of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, whose sexual relationship with Slade was teased to the public at the height of glam’s bisexual peak.

The film is garish at times and ragged around the edges, but even after 20 years of increasingly provocative and gay-forward film and television, Velvet Goldmine has a bold, clear energy that makes you sit up and pay attention. I’m not sure if Haynes would ever or even could ever take on a straightforward gay male love story. I can’t conceive of what his Brokeback Mountain or Call Me By Your Name would have looked like. But through the prism of this glam-rock memory trip, Haynes touches on so many aspects of the gay experience. There’s a scene early on where Bale’s Arthur Stuart, as a teenager, abashedly approaches the counter at his local music shop with a vinyl Brian Slade record in hand. He has to endure the gauntlet of his straight friends making cracks about the queer weirdo who, to Arthur, is everything he wants and wants to be. It’s a minute out of the whole movie, but it encapsulates such a massively relatable experience.

The whole movie is a testament to the ability of artiface to communicate a deeper truth. Velvet Goldmine emerged in 1998, after the alternative/grunge era of music but just on the cusp of a pop revolution that’s never quite ended, and the idea of harkening back to a musical era that had all of those traditionally “inauthentic” trappings (costumes and makeup and glitter and stunts) flew so appropriately in the face of where culture was at that moment.

Meanwhile, the overt sexuality that Haynes brought to this movie that he then cast with the likes of McGregor (who had just transitioned into mainstream notoriety) and Bale (who’d been in freaking Newsies!) is not to be underestimated. As a young, closeted youth, Velvet Goldmine meant to me what that Brian Slade record meant to young Arthur. Ewan McGregor in particular has never in his entire career reached the heights of sexiness he attained while capturing Curt Wild’s lithe, furious, sweat-slicked stage routine.

Velvet Goldmine has never been particularly buried. It premieres at Cannes, where Haynes won an award for Best Artistic Contribution. It got an Oscar nomination for costumes (the peerless Sandy Powell going all out with both evocative period detail and untethered outrageousness) and won the Indie Spirit award for Maryse Alberti’s cinematography.

Still, it has always been my feeling that queer audiences never internalized this movie the way they should have. Perhaps it was too specifically ’70s London in parts to make the sufficient impact. But even just going by the unscientific anecdotal evidence of “stuff I’ve seen Gay Twitter make memes about,” I’ve seen more overt queer love for 1998 movies Spice World, Practical Magic, You’ve Got Mail, The Parent Trap, Mulan, and Ever After than I have for Velvet Goldmine. This should change! At the very least, Toni Collette’s performance as Mandy Slade should have a permanent shrine in the “Yaaaasss Queen!” hall of fame for playing exactly the kind of boozy, quippy, once-trashy now acidly-knowing female character who gay audiences flock to.

Of course it’s far from too late. Velvet Goldmine was never a film of its time anyway. It’s a movie that began with Oscar Wilde, took a spin for a while with Bowie, and ended with two of the most successful leading men that the UK ever send to Hollywood in the ’90s butt-fucking on a London rooftop inside a glittering snow globe. It’s timeless in its examination of a time and place that were already long gone before Todd Haynes ever picked up a camera. But that spirit, equal parts performative queenery and melancholy regret, won’t lose its resonance any time soon. Which basically means there’s no time like the 20th anniversary to see what all the fuss is about.

Where to stream Velvet Goldmine