The biopic Stardust tracks a young David Bowie over the course of events that led to the creation of his stage persona Ziggy Stardust. The muted, sepia-toned film strives to portray the turmoil of a musician struggling to find his voice. Though the melancholic road movie doesn’t pull off everything that it wants to, it’s saved by Johnny Flynn’s sympathetic performance as the young, floundering artist.

Apparently, most critics have ripped Stardust to shreds. Mainly it’s because the liberties co-writer/director Gabriel Range (Death of a President) and Christopher Bell (Netflix’s The Last Czars) have taken with their script, but many have also pointed out that the rock star’s estate did not sign off on the project, and so the filmmakers weren’t allowed to use any of the late musician’s music. (A couple soundalikes are used instead.) Still, this is a bandwagon I do not feel the need to jump on.

Stardust mostly takes place over the course of a tour Bowie’s record company sent him on in 1971 to boost his popularity in America. His 1969 second album had been a hit but mostly because of the song “Space Oddity.” His 1970 follow-up, The Man Who Sold the World, tanked. Especially in the States. However, after arriving at customs, he finds out that his work visa was never filed, and therefore performing any paid gigs would be illegal. So instead his chaperone from the record company, Ron Oberman (Marc Maron), drives him around the country to give radio interviews and crash high-profile parties.

Much of the movie is made up of an awkward, young Bowie enduring the cringiest interviews ever. Some he seems to sabotage on purpose. In one, he even gets up and starts miming. The film depicts a David Bowie during a pivotal make-or-break point in his career when he was a brilliant songwriter but hadn’t quite become a performer yet, at least not at the virtuoso level we knew him to be.

The screenplay alternates between the tour and flashbacks of his half-brother, Terry (Derek Moran), who was hospitalized for schizophrenia. The film posits that at this age, Bowie feared developing the illness as well and worried that the music he heard in his head may be an early symptom. There are times when the flashbacks derail the story’s momentum, and the notion they put across is that, had Bowie not come up with Ziggy Stardust, he might have gone mad. Is that why the estate disapproved of the movie, turning Bowie into a flesh and blood human being with real fears about his sanity instead of just having the genius label slapped on him?

Flynn isn’t a dead ringer for Bowie. (He might actually be too good looking to play Bowie.) His Bowie is a fragile and modest artist who knows he is destined for greatness, but he’s still figuring out how he’s going to get there. Jena Malone is on hand as Bowie’s first wife, Angie. Malone’s penchant for playing fierce women is on full display here, playing a rock star wife with better business sense than the artist-spouse. The film plays up the possibility that Angie was exploiting Bowie, but also that she may have been the only person who saw his potential. Then there is podcaster and comedian Marc Maron playing Ron Oberman, the only person at Mercury Records who believes Bowie is the next big thing. Here he plays another variation of the same character he always plays: Marc Maron, though under a different name.

Stardust isn’t terrible. It’s just okay. And maybe its okayness is what angered so many other critics. I suspect this is because Bowie was such an icon and his gone-too-soon death in 2016 is still fresh for many. As opposed to recent rock biopics like Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody that were popcorn fare tackling the entire lifespans of their subjects, Stardust is a much more intimate portrait, zeroing in on just a slice of an artist’s life, not unlike the underrated Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy. It deserves credit for trying to be something different. After all, wasn’t that David Bowie’s message?