Dismissed it at the time but it's kind of fun

I remember being excited for another film with David Bowie whom I was crazy about back then age 12, but when I saw he wasn't the main character and it was a musical I decided not to see it. It came on tonight on Turner Classic Movies and some of the numbers are a lot of fun and surprisingly creative. I had a very different impression of Britain's popular culture from films of the 50s and 60s than is shown here and Absolute Beginners does seem a bit unreal or in fact surreal. When I think of the film Victim coming out in 1961 that doesn't seem like the same country depicted here. It's also odd how the film starts out surreal and stylized and doesn't ask us to take anything in it seriously throughout most of the film and then becomes a serious anti-racist message movie towards the end. It's as if they took two movies and pasted them together. When they had a racist rally I turned it off.