My second favorite film of all-time. I love Todd Haynes does not just recreate glam era London and point his camera at it; instead, it is as if he gave a traditional film LSD and ordered it to list to every David Bowie, Roxy Music, and T. Rex album in a rainbow colored room. The film is infused with glitter dusted sexuality and wit on the very level of its DNA, so it truly, vividly captures the youthful excitement of glam's rise, the movement's disturbing and glorious Technicolor height, and its melancholy downfall as its listeners grew older and its greatest artists either died or transformed. The structure, with a disillusioned Christian Bale investigating his past from a sinister vision of the 1980s, represents another clever layer of invention in a dream of a film focused on people who live and die within a dream of their own devising. And Jonathan Rhys Meyers is just a revelation as Bowie stand-in Brian Slade. His career is a bit cold right now, but I will always love him because of this film (and The Tudors); no one else could have played this character to such beautiful, cryptic, stylish perfection. He is a god here.

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