The star chromatic index of a multigraph G, denoted , is the minimum number of colors needed to properly color the edges of G such that no path or cycle of length four is bicolored. A multigraph G is star k‐edge‐colorable if . Dvořák, Mohar, and Šámal [Star chromatic index, J. Graph Theory 72 (2013), 313–326] proved that every subcubic multigraph is star 7‐edge‐colorable. They conjectured in the same article that every subcubic multigraph should be star 6‐edge‐colorable. In this article, we first prove that it is NP‐complete to determine whether for an arbitrary graph G. This answers a question of Mohar. We then establish some structure results on subcubic multigraphs G with such that but for any , where . We finally apply the structure results, along with a simple discharging method, to prove that every subcubic multigraph G is star 6‐edge‐colorable if , and star 5‐edge‐colorable if , respectively, where is the maximum average degree of a multigraph G. This partially confirms the conjecture of Dvořák, Mohar, and Šámal.