One of the leading lights of the New Queer Cinema movement in the early-1990s, Haynes is also, in many ways, a feminist director perennially fascinated by the structures that define a woman’s place in society. He was, for a while, one of America’s most controversial filmmakers, loathed by the religious right and The Carpenters.

Aged just 9, Haynes made his first short film, a version of Romeo And Juliet, on Super 8 and played both lovers himself. He continued this independent small-scale approach in college and had his first brush with controversy with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987). Re-enacting the singer’s doomed battle with anorexia using a cast of Barbie dolls and handcrafted cardboard sets, the film was withdrawn after Richard Carpenter obtained a “cease and desist” order (Haynes had used the duo’s songs without permission). The controversy surrounding his next film, Poison (1991), went all the way to Washington when the American Family Association wished hellfire and damnation upon the National Endowment for the Arts for giving public money to a movie containing “explicit porno scenes of homosexuals involved in anal sex”.

Despite the fact that Poison became a liberal cause célèbre and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, it took Haynes four long years to find funding for his next project, the extended AIDS metaphor Safe (1995). Critics, even admiring ones, were perplexed by the filmmaker’s story of a suburbanite (Julianne Moore) who becomes allergic to the twentieth century and seeks help from a New Age guru. Some suggested that Haynes should have been more clinical in his diagnosis of her disease and the efficacy of alternative medicines, but most regarded Safe as a mesmerizing and cerebral take on how illness informs identity. Velvet Goldmine (1998) played like a multicoloured, amped-up antidote to the white, antiseptic stillness of Safe. The strutting peacock world of 1970s glam rock was inventively and exuberantly celebrated as a Utopia of cross-dressing and sexual experimentation, and Haynes abandoned his previous strict directorial control in favour of a hedonistic flurry of self-indulgence.

For Far From Heaven (2002), Haynes thankfully gathered in the reins once again. A painstaking pastiche of the “women’s pictures” of Douglas Sirk, the film forged the same themes, narratives and super-saturated look that had defined the German director as an auteur in the 1950s. Haynes and cinematographer Edward Lachman fastidiously studied every frame of All That Heaven Allows (1955) to faithfully recreate Sirk’s lush, autumnal palette. Far From Heaven is a sumptuous homage to one of the two directors who have informed Haynes’s political and directorial sensibilities. It also satisfyingly completes the connection to the other great influence on Haynes’s work, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who had already doffed his cap to All That Heaven Allows in Fear Eats The Soul (1974).

In 2007, Haynes completed a long-cherished project, a biopic of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, in which several actors play various incarnations of his Bobness, including the distinctly female Cate Blanchett. No one can ever accuse Haynes of lacking ambition, or indeed imagination

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