A strange and sensual specimen of a time when filmmakers such as Nicolas Roeg (and Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky and René Laloux) set out to prove that science-fiction on film could be as challenging and adult as the most acclaimed speculative literature at the time. It’s a movie that forgoes melodrama for a slow simmer. It treats its revelations as discordant notes rather than bombastic crescendos. The lead character is an alien and Roeg lets him stay that way for two-and-a-half hours. There’s a wall between us and David Bowie (in his first feature film) here and it’s not only intentional but meticulously built. We never totally understand what’s percolating behind Bowie’s eyes as a man from another planet who’s landed on Earth in hopes of figuring out how to help his drought-stricken home world, but instead slips on alcohol, trips on information (filling his eyes via multiple television sets that he likes to watch all once, like an extraterrestrial Roky Erickson), stumbles over sex and loses his way. Like Roeg did with Mick Jagger in the great Performance, he uses a rock star to portray someone with no connection to any reality that we know. Still, Bowie is the whole show here. Roeg hands the film over to him and makes him sing an awkward song. Bowie broods, mumbles, strips naked and sometimes projects total blankness. Buck Henry, Candy Clark and Rip Torn all get strong supporting roles as the damaged, often off-putting people whom Bowie takes up on his mission, but Roeg sees to it that we never take our eyes off the alien. We spend most of the film searching Bowie’s face and body language for clues as to where this is all heading. Roeg gives us just enough that we stay on the trail. Based on Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel.