‘Harry Styles? Hardly’: John Cameron Mitchell on sex, punk and the next David Bowie

John Cameron Mitchell and I are playing a fun game. It’s called “Who is the David Bowie of this generation?”

I start with some low-hanging fruit, eager to elicit some easy outrage. What about Harry Styles, I suggest. Harry Styles often gets compared to Bowie.

Mitchell shoots me a dead-eyed glare. “Hardly,” he says. “I think he’s talented, I just don’t see him as a groundbreaker. Bowie would go to very strange places, and we would go along with him. He would try stuff that didn’t always pay off, but he tried it.”

Maybe Kanye? An innovator and provocateur who’s even going through his own fascist period, much like Bowie’s coke-fuelled Thin White Duke era.

“Very talented, but truly seems mentally ill,” says Mitchell. “I don’t know if he is, but the Kardashians seem to think so.”

Um, Yungblud? The British musician is no Bowie, but he has seemingly based his entire identity on Tommy Gnosis, the glam-rock ingenue in Mitchell’s Tony-winning musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (played in the 2001 film by Michael Pitt).

“Yes, he’s very Tommy,” Mitchell laughs. “I like him, he’s got a good vibe. He’s a populist, meaning we’re all in this together. But he also seems like a good lad. He’s not the usual brat boy.”

“The eclecticism of Bowie is hard to pin down,” says Mitchell. “There’s some who have surface eclecticism, like Madonna, but she didn’t write her own songs so it just seemed like fashion, a change of clothes. Like Lady Gaga, that’s just – what do you call it? – channel surfing. That’s not Bowie. Bowie would really think about his persona and go fully into them instead of just a photo shoot. I don’t know who else does that. I can’t think of anyone, really.”

Mitchell – filmmaker, actor, Tony winner and queer icon – has, as ever, got Bowie on his mind. After Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency last year, and with fascism rearing its head and technocrats flaunting a new world order, he was reminded of a quote from Gary Oldman: “It’s all been downhill since Bowie died.”

He dove back into Bowie’s most apocalyptic songs to help make sense of the moment. The result is I’m Afraid of Americans: A Bowie Song Cycle , a theatrical concert he’s bringing to Australia that celebrates the enduring relevance of Bowie’s work amid our impending end times.

“We’re in the middle of it now, and it’s pretty embarrassing and pretty repulsive. I think [Trump’s] doing himself in with all his mistakes, but the danger now is we’re afraid we’re going to go down with him,” says Mitchell.

But don’t worry, the show is not about Trump. “It’s about Bowie’s way of looking at the world. Someone once said about Ann-Margret, ‘She was anything but reassuring’, and Bowie’s not reassuring. In his lyrics, there was always a certain amount of fear and panic.”

Now 63, Mitchell has been a lifelong acolyte of Bowie’s. The pair had a tight, if limited, relationship in real life. When Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered off-Broadway in 1998, Bowie – clearly the musical’s main inspiration – was among its early champions.

“He came to the show in the first incarnation, and it was very exciting,” says Mitchell.