Golden eye.

In Velvet Goldmine Todd Haynes takes an affectionate look at the glam-rock era--when all that glittered was gay

Velvet Goldmine * Written and directed by Todd Haynes * Starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale, Toni Collette, and Eddie Izzard * Miramax

When Todd Haynes's 1991 film Poison hit theaters, it made us feel positively inadequate. It was as if there weren't enough eyes in our heads to see everything he saw. Haynes was like some celluloid Antichrist damning the Aristotelian unities to hell, ricocheting through time and space between the laboratory of an obsessed scientist, the bedroom of an enfant terrible, and the erotically charged bunkers of a prison. All he lacked, it seemed, was money.

Two pictures later, Haynes has the bucks, and ooh, wow, what he does with them. The big screen can barely contain the razzle-dazzle rush of movement, color, and music that spills over in Velvet Goldmine, his roiling valentine to the glam-rock era. And Haynes, with his godlike omniscience, can hardly contain himself. He's so hepped up by his subject matter that he can't sit still. As he darts about in time, back and forth, up and down, over and across, one spends a good part of the picture unhinged.

Haynes has cooked up no less than three male protagonists whose lives collide in both the professional and romantic arenas. At the hub is Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a pan-sexual British rock icon of the early '70s who abandons his pedestal at the full flush of his fame. Flanking him are his American role model Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), a rough rider of the glam-rock scene who eventually becomes Slade's muse, and Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), an expatriate British journalist on a mission to investigate Slade's whereabouts.

Velvet Goldmine sets off exactly where you would expect a glam-rock movie to begin: with the birth of Oscar Wilde in 1854 Dublin. In Haynes's eyes Wilde is the original glitter cowboy, the pioneer of sexual subversion, without whom the Iggy Pops and Ziggy Stardusts would never have seen the light of day or sequins.

After this prelude Haynes leaps between 1984, when Arthur launches his inquiry into Slade's fate, and the '70s heyday of Slade and Wild. Chief among the players that Arthur's Citizen Kane-like investigation dredges up are Slade's visionary promoter (transvestite comic Eddie Izzard) and Slade's wife, Mandy (the wonderful Toni Collette of Muriel's Wedding).

Haynes's confounding time structure grips at first but begins to spin out of control by the second half. He layers in one too many perspectives, giving us flashbacks within flashbacks, invisibly blended rock videos, home movie-style interludes, and fantasy sequences. Still, the flamboyant form honors the content. Haynes wittily employs the media to delineate glam rock's stylistic rebellion against the austere postures of hippiedom. The music is thumping and infectious, the costumes of Sandy Powell a show unto themselves. As an evocation of a bygone pop era, Velvet Goldmine is an impressive leap beyond The Rose and Grace of My Heart.

Stuart is theater critic and senior film writer for Newsday.