A UFO descends over Victorian-era Dublin, depositing baby Oscar Wilde upon the doorstep of his soon-to-be parents. Upon the baby's blanket is pinned a gold brooch bearing an emerald-green stone.

A narrator's voice intones, "Histories, like ancient ruins, are the fictions of empires."

Thus sets the metaphorical, fairy-tale tone of Velvet Goldmine. It is from this perspective that the film demands to be viewed, and in fact, will only confuse and disappoint if seen through a lens of traditional narrative.

The film is a wildly uneven, yet ultimately successful attempt to capture the history of glam rock on the silver screen. The secret to the film's moments of brilliance, is that instead of a straightforward retelling of a decade's ups and down (which would probably please no one) screenwriter/director Todd Haynes (Safe, Poison, Superstar) has reinvented glam's history, and tells the story the way it should have happened.

The result is a symbol-packed, dream-washed, glittery fairy-story of capital-G Glam Rock, as if told from a glam perspective.

For those familiar with glam's history and discography, the movie is rich with rewarding insider jokes, homage, and distortion of actual events. It also crosses the line into rumor, speculation, and outright fabrication. The intent from beginning to end is to both celebrate the movement's outrageous spirit, and to mock its vain shortcomings.

Even glam superstars like Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), the film's David Bowie-surrogate, are presented as lost little boys whom even fame does not satisfy. Their real desires are the homosexual longings promised by their camp-drag appearances.

A young boy, Jack Fairy, finds the emerald brooch as he lies upon the ground following a beating from a group of schoolmates. Fairy (our Brian Ferry stand-in), already an outsider, now discovers his true calling -- glam. Fairy thus becomes the trend-setter by whom everyone else is influenced.

Haynes' use of the brooch to signify the transferable Spirit of Glam suggests that glam's girly-man luminaries could have only been motivated to their flamboyant parodies of femininity through alien influence. In fact, the film's main thematic agenda is an exhortation to come out of the closet and embrace one's secret longings -- in this case, represented by the repressed homosexuality of main character, journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale). Goldmine boldly reiterates the central idea of the greatest glam-film ever, The Rocky Horror Picture Show: "Don't dream it, be it." When Stuart finally finds himself, he receives possession of the brooch as symbolic acknowledgement of his transformation.

Ever-present is the idea that film, history, and image are all lies we create for our the benefit of ourselves and others. At one point, it is said of Slade that "he was elegance walking arm-in-arm with a lie." Mandy Slade (Toni Collette), his wife, says to Stuart, "a smile is a lie." Slade's Ziggy Stardust-style alter ego, Maxwell Demon, is a performance that even Slade begins to believe. One of the only realities is this illusory world is the love between Slade and Kurt Wild (our Iggy Pop, vigorously played by Ewan McGregor); but if it's one thing an environment built on lies cannot support, it is truth.

The narrative's patchwork approach will be off-putting to some. Yet this structure makes perfect sense in light of the subject matter. The history of music is itself a patchwork of rumor, hearsay, myth, and legend, fused with a drug-and-alcohol-hazed selective memory of actual events. The story perfectly approximates this process by jumps in time, space, and logic to create a gestalt of the events rather than a simulation of them; further exploration of the notion of history as lies. This is both the film's strength and its weakness.

Non-linearity introduces its own set of problems, most notably the tough tasks of maintaining narrative flow, cohesion, and completeness. But this postmodern approach can be delightfully rewarding by jolting us out of our preconceived and preprogrammed expectations of narrative. A wonderful example, and a brilliant film, is Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Gould reflects upon the main character's life in vignettes, which results in an almost palpable taste in your mouth of his eccentric personality. Its rewards lie not in structural discovery, but in how it imparts insight and "between-the-lines" information about its subject.

Haynes fuses this approach with the idea of filmic atmosphere as itself a kind of story. Foremost, glam is about aural bliss fused with visually manifested sexual desire through the idolization, iconization, and emulation of pansexual rock-star demigods. In this, the film delivers. And thus, Goldmine itself is best absorbed through the senses rather than processed by the intellect. It is film as music or poetry.

Haynes' stylistic influences are many, and include fond touches of Ken Russell (Tommy, The Devils) and Richard Lester (in the tradition of his A Hard Day's Night and Help!). And seldom is music so fused with image as is evident in this film.

Whether David Bowie or Iggy Pop had an actual romance is irrelevant. What matters to Haynes, and to how he wants to remember the history of glam, is that it should have happened that way. Of such wishful suppositions are fables made.