Masculinity has always been a fraught subject in rock — a form that elevated swagger even as a handful of its most important figures quietly redefined what it could mean. The new documentary Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex revisits one of those figures, arguing that Marc Bolan’s music, style and candidness about his sexuality make him a more radical performer than popular memory often allows. According to the original report on the film, the documentary uses archival footage and interviews to reposition Bolan not only as a musical pioneer but as an early, visible bisexual presence in rock’s mainstream.
A striking moment reproduced in the film is a short, frank interview in which a female journalist teases Bolan about ‘the bisexual trick’. In the clip he replies that he has ‘experienced many things’ and that he has loved both men and women, before adding with his usual brio that he ‘tends to sexually go more towards women.’ The snippet — and a cheeky aside about a planned, never‑realised marriage to David Bowie — is presented in the film as evidence that Bolan’s openness was neither merely fashion nor publicity: it was lived, if playfully professed, and it was part of the way he presented himself to the world.
The documentary, which gathers testimony from peers and archival clips of contemporaries including Elton John, Ringo Starr and Bowie himself, is currently on a select theatrical release and is slated for streaming on demand from 5 September. According to coverage of the film, Angelheaded Hipster seeks to restore Bolan’s place in the story of glam rock at a moment when retrospectives are reshaping how the era is understood. The filmmakers treat the archival interviews as primary evidence and the result is less hagiography than a reappraisal that emphasises complexity.
Bolan’s commercial impact is plain in the record. Industry chart data shows T. Rex enjoyed extraordinary success between 1970 and 1973, scoring multiple top‑ten singles and several UK number ones, with landmark tracks such as Hot Love, Get It On (retitled Bang a Gong (Get It On) in the United States) and Telegram Sam. Music reference works identify the 1971 album Electric Warrior as a touchstone for glam rock, and historians credit Bolan’s transition from the acoustic psychedelia of Tyrannosaurus Rex to the electric swagger of T. Rex with helping to shape the look and sound that defined the early‑70s British scene.
The film does not shy away from the complicated friendship and rivalry between Bolan and David Bowie — a relationship captured in archival footage in which Bowie calls Bolan ‘a very very good friend’. The pair met in the 1960s and shared early ambitions, but contemporary accounts and the documentary suggest a dynamic that moved from camaraderie to competition as both men approached mainstream success. The film uses those tensions to illuminate the pressures and myth‑making that swirled around glam’s two most visible figures.
Angelheaded Hipster also situates Bolan in a much longer lineage of performers who challenged narrow norms of masculine performance. Documentaries and cultural histories point to Little Richard as an earlier exemplar: his theatrical costumes, makeup and flamboyant stagecraft in the 1950s widened what was possible in terms of gender presentation in popular music and helped create the cultural conditions for later artists — from Bowie and Bolan to generations of queer and gender‑fluid performers — to experiment onstage. The documentary’s archival approach underscores that Bolan did not invent that lineage but inhabited and extended it in his own way.
Any reassessment of Bolan must reckon with the abruptness of his death. Contemporary reporting recalls the crash on 16 September 1977 in Barnes, when the Mini driven by Gloria Jones hit a tree; Bolan was killed, aged 29, and the site became a focus for public mourning. The film plays with that sense of loss, suggesting that part of Bolan’s mystique arose from the lacuna his early death left in British rock — a career truncated just as his celebrity and influence were becoming more widely appreciated.
Whatever the balance of myth and reality, institutional recognition has followed. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted T. Rex in 2020, an acknowledgement that official histories increasingly place Bolan and his band among the architects of glam. Chart records and music histories continue to cite the band’s run of commercial hits and the lasting influence of albums such as Electric Warrior as evidence that Bolan’s combination of androgynous style and populist songwriting helped to reposition rock’s possibilities for performance, fashion and sexual expression.
Angelheaded Hipster therefore reads as both a portrait and a corrective: it makes the case that Bolan’s sexual candour, theatricality and songwriting mattered in concert — that he was at once a pop star, a stylist and a performer whose visibility helped broaden the terms on which masculinity could be performed in rock. According to the original report, the film stops short of turning Bolan into an icon sanitised for posterity; instead it emphasises his contradictions, his humour and the way he used showmanship to complicate, rather than simply overturn, the gender codes of his time. For queer audiences attuned to the history of visibility, the film offers a reminder that sexual openness in rock has many antecedents — and that the work of reassessing those antecedents is still unfolding.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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