Stardust lead Johnny Flynn has defended the polarising David Bowie biopic, making the argument that it is the antidote to the “bland and safe” string of music biopics that have dominated mainstream media over the past few years.
The release of Stardust has been accompanied by a series of roadblocks and mishaps. First and foremost, the film failed to secure the blessing of Bowie’s family.
In January 2019 Bowie’s son, film director Duncan Jones, took to Twitter to confirm that the Bowie family did not support the film, and that the production would not feature any original music from The Thin White Duke.
“This movie won’t have any of Dad’s music in it, & I can’t imagine that changing,” he wrote at the time. “If you want to see a biopic without his music or the family’s blessing, that’s up to the audience.”
After failing to secure to rights to Bowie’s material, the production instead opted to use original music penned by Johnny Flynn – who fronts the folk act, The Sussex Wit.
“I don’t think it’s crap, but I knew it didn’t have to be a brilliant song,” Flynn admitted of penning an original track for the film. “He had this sense of failure, he wanted to be someone else and hadn’t found a way of capitalizing on that yet. So I tried to write this song as Bowie ripping off Lou Reed.”
For context, Stardust follows a 24-year-old Bowie’s first trip to America, his experience grappling with his artistic identity and the events that shaped the creation of his most iconic alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. As director Gabriel Range explains, Stardust is not a biopic, rather “a film about what makes someone become an artist; what actually drives them to make their art.”
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“That someone is David Bowie, a man we’re used to thinking about as the star he became, or as one of his alter egos: Ziggy Stardust; Aladdin Zane; The Thin White Duke,” he explained. “Someone I only ever saw at a great distance, behind a mask; a godlike, alien presence. Even in his perfectly choreographed death, he didn’t seem like a regular human being.”
In a new interview with Sky News’ Backstage Podcast, Flynn has doubled-down on defending the biopic, whilst taking a delicious dig at the recent string of sterile music documentaries we’ve begrudgingly sat through.
“I think you could argue that this story told with the complicit cooperation of an estate would mean that it becomes a homogenised, slightly, sort of suppressed version of the story, and with all due respect to the Bowie estate and family, we just wanted to be able to tell the story that we wanted to tell,” he admitted.
“All too often we’ve seen with musician biopics and other biopics recently that eventually things just become, I think, a bit bland and safe because of the estate, trying to kind of protect the legacy of the subject.”
We admire Johnny Flynn’s conviction but we’re not convinced that his passion is enough to make up for the fact that at it’s core Stardust is just… bad.
Watch the trailer for Stardust below:
