The Glory Road

By JAY COCKS

STARDUST

Directed by MICHAEL APTED Screenplay by RAY CONNOLLY

When last seen in That 'II Be the Day (TIME, Dec. 16), Jim MacLaine had left his wife and child in a dreary English town for a stroll down the glory road. He wanted to learn guitar and get himself into the palmy world of rock 'n' roll. In Stardust, MacLaine finds success --more of it than he bargained for or can handle.

The movie is fast, canny, tough-minded about the blandishments and attendant sacrifices of superstardom. Director Michael Apted and Scenarist Ray Connolly (who also wrote That'll Be the Day) are most adept at getting across the quality of quick chaos that attends this kind of celebrity, and they excel at making both lucid and scary the business dealings of an unwary superstar.

MacLaine (played with charm and chill by David Essex, himself a British pop star) goes a long way on a modest talent. Some of his success is sheer luck; most can be traced to the general craziness of the times, when a boy from the north could become a crown prince on the strength of one good tune or two. Stardust picks up in 1964, and MacLaine and his group, the Stray Cats, seem modeled on the Beatles. They jump from being a bunch of good-time lads playing dungeons in Liverpool to the very top of the pops in a series of brisk scenes that capture both the suddenness and improbability of such success. Once he has it made, MacLaine becomes in quick succession a poet, a guru, a her mit and finally a cultural casualty. He is aided and discomforted through the entire trajectory by his personal man ager (Adam Faith), and the business man (Larry Hagman) who has turned him into a conglomerate.

No movie has yet shown quite so cunningly or colorfully as Stardust all the internal battles of superstardom. If it dealt as strongly with the personal struggles, it would be even better. But this is a film that captures surfaces: the high-charged energy of a concert, the languor and uncertainty that comes with getting it all before you have wanted it long or hard enough. MacLaine is a familiar character, and the film makers are careful to make him selfish and artistically ambitious beyond his true abil ity. The movie's funniest sequence is MacLaine's masterwork, a rock chorale dedicated to sanctifying women and fea turing the composer himself -- singing like an androgynous elf, surrounded by hundreds of young girls, dressed in brid al gowns and crooning fervently.

Druggy Melancholy. Stardust is brightly acted, especially by Hagman, Faith, Ines Des Longchamps, as a girl friend of MacLaine's, and Keith Moon, usually drummer of The Who, moon lighting as one of the Stray Cats.

Throughout, Apted and Connolly rather dryly observe MacLaine as he slips into druggy melancholy, paranoia and self-pity, grooming himself for martyr dom. Then, abruptly, irony is forsaken, and he becomes a full-fledged martyr, dying flamboyantly on-camera, done in by the same forces that created him. It is a facile, melodramatic conclusion that does nothing to complement all the good that has gone before.

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