Plot
The story follows a British journalist, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), who revisits his own past while writing an article about the mysterious disappearance of a former glam-rock star, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), for an American periodical. Slade's career had ended during backlash from a publicity stunt: he faked being murdered on-stage, after which he gradually disappeared from the public view entirely. Stuart locates and talks with people connected to Slade, trying to find out what happened to him, and recalls the glam-rock scene of the '70s in a series of vignettes, which recreate the stories of Slade, Slade's collaborator and onetime lover Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), Slade's former wife, Mandy (Toni Collette) and others involved in their lives. The film utilizes a non-linear structure to interweave the stories of the various characters.
Read more about this topic: Velvet Goldmine
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)