Reception
Janet Maslin, having seen the film at the New York Film Festival, made it a "NYT Critics' Pick," calling it "dazzlingly surreal" rock version of "Citizen Kane with an extraterrestrial Rosebud" and saying it "brilliantly reimagines the glam-rock 70's as a brave new world of electrifying theatricality and sexual possibility, to the point where identifying precise figures in this neo-psychedelic landscape is almost beside the point. Velvet Goldmine tells a story the way operas do: blazing with exquisite yet abstract passions, and with quite a lot to look at on the side." According to Peter Travers, "Haynes creates Velvet Goldmine..."with a masturbatory fervor that demands dead-on details" and "fashions a structure out of Citizen Kane"; it's a film that "works best as a feast of sight and sound,...re-creating an era as a gorgeous carnal dream,...celebrat the art of the possible."
The film wasn't successful at the box office, making just $1.5m on a budget of $9m.
In a 2009 retrospective review of the "New Cult Canon", Scott Tobias wrote "Much like Haynes' recent I'm Not There, which dissected the various phases of Bob Dylan's life and career by casting six different actors (including Bale and Cate Blanchett) as Dylan, Velvet Goldmine doesn't come at glam-rock directly, and both films cause no end of frustration to those who can't get on their wavelength"; "Haynes' background in semiotics has led some critics to dismiss these films as too academic, but figures like Dylan and Bowie are notoriously elusive, and his effort to access them indirectly, through allusion and representation, pays more dividends than a straightforward biopic ever could." According to Tobias, "it took serious moxie for Haynes to consciously crib from the greatest film ever made, ...but the Citizen Kane structure is perhaps Velvet Goldmine's biggest masterstroke. ...y presenting Slade, like Kane, as a mystery to be solved (or not), Haynes can evoke the glam-rock movement without destroying the all-important mystique that sustains it. After all, this is a musical subgenre built on fluid identity and sexuality, and the illusion of a fantastical world that doesn't have much in common with the real one."
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