ANGELHEADED HIPSTER: THE SONGS OF MARC BOLAN & T. REX

AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex, Greenwich Enterainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 7, 2025

The entire schematic of AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex is sort of contradictory. It wants to highlight the life, career, and songwriting talent of Marc Bolan, the late frontman of the English rock group T. Rex, but it also wants, to put it bluntly, to sell an album in which other musicians cover the band's songs. That the tribute album was released almost exactly five years ago only adds another clashing layer to director Ethan Silverman's documentary. It's several years too late for a sales pitch.

Obviously, the movie was completed closer to the album's release, so the fact that the documentary itself is only being released now has little to do with the filmmakers. The belated timing, though, does highlight how shallow the project is in terms of serving both as a biography of Bolan and as publicity push for the album that shares the movie's title. Surely, it would have felt that way regardless of when the movie was released.

As biography, it does little to illuminate Bolan's personal and professional lives. It amounts to a lot of talking heads, mostly the artists who have been assembled to put their own (often lesser) stamp on the songs of T. Rex, saying how fine and overlooked a songwriter Bolan was. That might be the case, but wouldn't it make more sense to prove that by focusing exclusively on the man and the band themselves?

It's not as if the musicians here have much to say, since Silverman and his crew are talking to them before and after recording sessions for the tribute album. U2, who offer a stripped-down version of the already-sparse "Get It On" (also known as "Bang a Gong (Get It On)"), leave the talking to guitarist the Edge, who strums an acoustic guitar to the pseudo-blues riff that dominates the tune in a studio removed from his bandmates. Whatever he has to say about Bolan's songwriting is mostly forgettable, mainly because the broad praise is replicated by every other musician who's interviewed here.

They include Nick Cave, Joan Jett, and lots of other less-famous acts, who mainly come across as polite and accommodating about having a camera put in their face while they're preparing to record or ready to head home for the day. Some of them can't even be bothered to speak or, perhaps, said even less-consequential things than what made the final cut, which certainly would have been interesting to hear. How could it be so uninteresting as to not be included among the repetitive, non-specific thoughts that did make the documentary?

Slightly more intriguing are the more frequent and longer interviews with people who knew and worked with Bolan before his death in a 1977 car accident at the age of 29. They include Billy Idol, Elton John, and Ringo Starr, as well as some archival footage of David Bowie, whose glam-rock phase was inspired by Bolan's then-revolutionary sense of on-stage and behind-the-scenes style. That group of interviewees can at least offer some specifics, as can Bolan's partner Gloria Jones and their son Rolan Bolan, who was about 2 years old when his father died.

The recording sessions, taking place in England and the United States, make up about half of the documentary. Several of the covers are "deconstructions" of the original songs, which makes some sense as a means to bring attention to Bolan's lyrics. Well, it could have been a good idea, if not for how distracting some of the instrumentation on those reconfigured tunes turn out to be.

The whole project is overseen by producer Hal Willner, on what would turn out to be his final work. If the album is such a vital part of this narrative, one would imagine Willner's contributions to it might have been a more significant focal point in the movie, especially within the context of his death a few months before the album was released. Instead, Silverman just occasionally notes that Willner is the room, talking to and watching the talent, and his death is literally an afterthought here.

We get the same sense about the biographical element of the documentary, which highlights some aspects of Bolan's life, work, and public persona. He was also a poet, for example, so we get some lengthy excerpts from his poetry for little reason, and many of the archival interviews featuring Bolan hint at a man who wants attention outside of his music and is a little irritated when he doesn't receive it. He's a rock star, in other words, and that's about as deep an examination of the man as we get here.

AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex is torn between its two modes—biography and behind-the-scenes document. It's clearly intended to be a tribute to the subject in both of them, but the movie stretches itself so thin on both fronts that it doesn't function even as that.

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