‘Moonage Daydream’ directed by Brett Morgen (USA, 2022)
While this movie is an all the hits celebration of David Bowie’s extraordinary life and times it is far from being a conventional music documentary. Filmmaker Brett Morgen instead painstakingly adopts a more impressionistic and eclectic approach which entails deliberately not being slavish to the chronological sequence of events. Viewers are bombarded with a head-spinningly kaleidoscopic mix compiled as if Morgen were suffering from ADHD. These include clips of German Expressionistic cinema, silent films, Kabuki theatre, contemporary dance, art works, city life and space travel.
The main impetus seems to be to try to capture the thrill of what it must have been like to be inside the head of David Bowie. Amid the chaos Morgen does find space for some more reflective detail which ironically proves to be equally, if not more, revealing. I would have happily watched the whole of the 12 minute TV interview in 1979 with Mavis Nicholson.
Morgen’s audio-visual collage is most effective in scenes like a montage of dance moves from over the years to accompany a live performance of ‘Let’s Dance’. It does, however, produce forced and misleading juxtapositions. For instance, Bowie’s declared love for Iman, who he met in 1990, is sound-tracked by ‘Word On A Wind’, a song from the Station To Station album released 14 years earlier.
The movie also suggests that there were very few down moments in his career. This was not the case. Up until the astonishing ‘Blackstar’, released just before his death in 2016, I would argue that the last essential Bowie albums were 1980’s ‘Scary Monsters & Super Creeps’ and ‘Let’s Dance’ from 1983. Musically, there were plenty of lean pickings during the late 1980s and 1990s. The entire output of the dire Tin Machine band which Bowie fronted from 1988 to 1992 is conspicuous by its absence. One notable exception was the song ‘Hello Spaceboy’ (1995) which is rightly given prominence in Morgen’s movie.
This is a warts-free review of the great man’s career which only gives Bowie’s version of events and means there limited criticism and no room for a wider perspective of the world in musical or socio-political terms . There are no contributions from his collaborators so it give the misleading impression that Bowie did it all alone in some a self-created artistic vacuum
Apart from the comments from excited fans (“He’s just smashing!”), Bowie is pretty much the only voice we hear. This avoids having a series of tedious talking heads telling us ad infinitum what a genius he was but also means that the movie is overly reverential. Bowie’s statement that he sought to create a new musical language for the brilliant Berlin trilogy (Low/Heroes and The Lodger) is dubious given that it ignores the fact that he drew liberally upon classical minimalism, ambient mood music and Krautrock. His genius was that he could remake , remodel and popularize such diverse influences.
Bowie’s disembodied voiceover is full of philosophical profundities about time, space, life and death. It shows that he was widely read and that he had plenty of perceptive observations on identity, spirituality and creativity but he was not Friedrich Nietzche. His words of wisdom would have been more effective if placed in a wider context.
More humor and context would have given us a greater and more human perspective. For instance; I would have liked some lighter, self-deprecating moments such as when Bowie recalled a moment while doing filming the video to Ashes To Ashes on a beach: ”I walked past the old guy and sat next to camera in my full costume waiting for him to pass. As he is walking by camera the director said, excuse me Mr do you know who this is? The old guy looks at me from bottom to top and looks back to the director and said… ‘Of course I do!!!! it’s some cunt in a clown suit.’ That was a huge moment for me, It put me back in my place and made me realize, yes I’m just a cunt in a clown suit. I think about that old guy all the time.”
In place of down to earth comments like this, one gets the impression that we mere earthlings are supposed to listen in awe to the thoughts of an alien life form who morphed from humble suburban beginnings in South London to a globe-trotting superstar.
Though flawed and far from definitive, the grandiosity of ‘Moonage Daydream’ alone makes it well worth experiencing. Two plus hours of material endorsed by Bowie’s estate is rightly presented as a unique cinematic event best seen on a big screen rather than casually viewed online.
