`VELVET' MINES GLITTER-ROCK GLAM.

Byline: Janet Maslin The New York Times

Todd Haynes' dazzlingly surreal ``Velvet Goldmine'' offers a celestial ``Here's looking at you, kid'' to the heyday of British glitter rock in general and to the David Bowie of the early 1970s in particular. Without addressing Bowie directly, it appropriates his shimmering, protean aura in virtuoso ways that put ordinary period filmmaking or time-capsule musicology to shame.

The astounding Haynes, whose last film (``Safe'') took place on an entirely different planet from this one, brilliantly reimagines the glam-rock '70s as a brave new world of electrifying theatricality and sexual possibility, to the point where identifying precise figures in this neo-psychedelic landscape is almost beside the point. ``Velvet Goldmine'' tells a story the way operas do: blazing with exquisite yet abstract passions, and with quite a lot to look at on the side.

Structured as a rock ``Citizen Kane'' with an extraterrestrial Rosebud, ``Velvet Goldmine'' traces its tendrils back to Oscar Wilde, whom it imagines as a schoolboy. (``I want to be a pop idol,'' this child sweetly announces.) A century later, the Wildean spirit of flamboyance is spectacularly reborn, ready to erupt into the glittery, pansexual pop utopia over which Bowie so dramatically presided.

The film, with a vibrant soundtrack of glam-era homages and originals (such performers as Roxy Music, T. Rex, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop are interwoven ingeniously), doesn't force its musical references on audiences, but it evokes them with vast fondness and fascination. ``People have certain memories that they hold very dear, so you want to remain true to them,'' Christine Vachon, the film's audacious producer, has explained.

Out of the wild Ken Russell-ish phantasmagoria of ``Velvet Goldmine,'' several essential characters emerge, central among them the Bowie-esque Brian Slade. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a stunningly pretty, insolent, snake-hipped presence, he embodies the provocative and mysterious heart of the film. Haynes, cerebral as ever despite this film's explosion of visual sensuality, surrounds Slade with implicit questions about art and inspiration, truth and honesty, passion and repression. ``You live in terror of NOT being misunderstood,'' Slade is eventually told by Mandy (Toni Collette), another witchily familiar figure here. Mandy is an American whose transformation into London party girl is, we're told, a great source of amusement to one and all.

Playing what he has rightly called ``a birthday present of a part,'' Ewan McGregor makes a fabulously charismatic rock star named Curt Wild, who is both reproach and object of fascination for Brian Slade. Whatever else he may be, McGregor's often hilariously decadent Curt Wild is the real thing. With typically wicked wit, the film mentions that Curt underwent early shock treatments ``to fry the fairy clean out of him,'' and that the net effect of this was ``to make him bonkers every time he heard an electric guitar.'' The resultant mad-dog stage presence, with as much Jim Morrison as Iggy Pop, is exultantly displayed.

In a film that has at least one more major character than it needs, and that like ``Safe'' overworks its elusiveness in ways sure to confound some audiences, Christian Bale plays the journalist a la ``Kane'' who investigates Brian Slade from the chilly distance of 1984. That period is rendered no less fancifully than the film's rainbow days, as Bale's doleful Arthur Stuart reaches out from his dreary present to a past that both entices and humiliates him. Arthur, the fan who is forever linked to Curt Wild in one of the film's most exquisitely imaginative visions, conveys all the wistful distance of what it means to see the events here from the outside, looking in.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Velvet Goldmine'' (R; strong sexual content, nudity, language, drug use).

The stars: Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Toni Collette, Christian Bale and Eddie Izzard.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Todd Haynes. Produced by Christine Vachon. Released by Miramax Films.

Running time: Two hours.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars.

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Photo

Photo: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, left, and Ewan McGregor play glam-era British rockers in ``Velvet Goldmine.''