As poisoned pills go, we can't think of many more cyanide-dripping than being tasked not just with playing David Bowie, the chameleonic prince of pop, but also writing a bunch of songs that sound like Bowie's, because your production company couldn't get the rights.
Such is the task facing Johnny Flynn, who's gamely stepped in David's platform boots in the trailer for Bowie biopic Stardust. It follows him on tour in the US in the early Seventies, when he was floundering creatively and commercially, and before he'd found the sound that would result in one of the most vaunted album runs in history, starting with 1972's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
The version of Bowie we see here is a bit lost, a bit directionless, in need of a steer from his tough-love US promoter (played by Marc Maron, seemingly recycling his tough-love wrestling promoter from Glow) but still Bowie-ish enough to chat about dressing up in women's clothes during radio interviews.
The big problem, though, is the music – or rather, the lack of it. You see, the producers of Stardust couldn't get the rights to the Bowie back catalogue, which means you end up with a music biopic about one of the greatest songwriters of the last century, soundtracked but what sounds like the library music you get on a YouTube ad about workplace efficiency software. Flynn has also written some original songs, ostensibly in the vein of Bowie's Hunky Dory-era work, which aren't anything of the sort.
The other, arguably even bigger misstep is that this looks like a Bowie biopic that captures none of his renegade, rule-breaking charisma. Flynn plays him as shrinking creature, passive, waiting for other people to point him where he should be heading. Which, at this point in his life, OK, probably accurate. But not really what people want in a film about David Bowie. It doesn't help that he looks and sounds like some Poundland version of the man he's supposed to be playing (his accent ends up more Ricky Gervais than Ziggy Stardust). You don't need to do an impersonation to make a biopic work, but this portrayal is like a piano where all the notes are slightly out of tune (as my colleague put it, if you can't get someone who looks exactly like the real person, you should be obliged to cast Michael Sheen).
It also seems criminal that a figure who always revelled in rule-breaking and reinvention should be given the by-numbers biopic treatment; a chronological tick-tock in which, at first, no one believes in him, until some revelation occurs, and he proves them all wrong. Bowie deserves better than that. We deserve more than that.
When Bowie died, almost five years ago, his was the first of a string of celebrity deaths that sparked memes about how 2016 was a "cursed year". Well, it doesn't look all that bad now. Perhaps the most egregious thing about Stardust is that it's arriving when the music industry is in such dire straits. A film about one pop's great performers, with none of the songs, arriving at a time when we can't actually go and see any real live music, is just cruel. Watching this trailer, I just miss David Bowie even more.
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