Moonage Daydream

'Moonage Daydream,' Brett Morgen's dazzling study of David Bowie, is a new kind of music documentary — a grad-school-level deep dive that skips the obvious ...

And for the geeks, there is super-rare footage from early “Ziggy Stardust” dates in England, a segment of “Rock and Roll With Me” from the scantly documented 1974 “Soul Tour,” and even footage of him with Elizabeth Taylor and William Burroughs (although not together, unfortunately). Indeed, few songs or videos here get a full airing, and one that does — a hoarsely sung live version of “Modern Love” — seems to be there to emphasize Bowie’s comments about how lightweight his music became in his extremely lucrative early ‘80s bid for megastardom, the “Let’s Dance” album. His first and last 20 years are dealt with briefly, although revealingly; there are few if any glimpses of his first wife, Angela (who exerted an enormous and under-acknowledged influence on the Ziggy era) or his children, although his older brother Terry, probably the greatest influence on the young Bowie, gets a larger than usual viewing. While that makes for an unusually free-form approach to structuring a documentary (and was enormously challenging for Morgen, who worked on the film for over four years and suffered a heart attack while doing it), in many ways it’s freeing: Instead of a rigid timeline or forced, overarching theme dictating the narrative, Bowie’s words do. Like another recent historical film about an oft-trodden subject — Todd Haynes’ “ [The Velvet Underground](https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/the-velvet-underground-review-todd-haynes-john-cale-lou-reed-1235013500/)” — it eschews the standard, chronological, done-to-death “Behind the Music”-style template that has become a predictable default for music documentaries and finds a dramatically different way to tell the story. Ultimately that era amounted to a hollow retroactive paycheck for his years of innovation: “Even though it was very successful, there was no growth,” Bowie says in a voiceover.

It's something of a convention when it comes to David Bowie biopics, of which Moonage Daydream (15A) is the latest, to proceed according to a strict ...

That’s a grandiose claim, but it allows the filmmaker to juxtapose aspects of Bowie’s personality in ways that allow us to see beyond the established mythology. Happily, Brett Morgan’s documentary is a less literal affair than most. It’s something of a convention when it comes to David Bowie biopics, of which Moonage Daydream (15A) is the latest, to proceed according to a strict chronological narrative, in which David Jones becomes Ziggy Stardust and then Aladdin Sane and afterwards metamorphoses into the Thin White Duke, etc.

Again, the film uses archival footage to tell the story of a beloved figure in music. This time, instead of presenting an audience with a clear-cut narrative, ...

It was mainly because from the time I was 12 to the time I was 47, I went pedal to the metal. I realized that through David I can offer my children a roadmap on how to get the most out of life, while still having a balance and how to surf the chaos. Bowie was a better hero to me than Thor; he was a better hero to me than any of the Marvel characters. We do live in a chaotic and fragmented world and culture and you can kind of fight that or you can swim with it. and when I had a heart attack the first words out of my mouth to the surgeon were “I need to be on set on Monday. When I was a kid the stuff that I loved was “ The difference between Bowie and almost any other popular artist in my lifetime was, he would have risked it all to satisfy a creative itch. In every moment in life he wanted to feel, he wanted to experience. I really hope people go out in the first few days when there’s crowds there because I do—COVID aside, hopefully with masks on—I do feel that it's a really communal experience and there is something ... But, David Bowie—one of the unique aspects of him was he was always kind of an enigma, he was always sort of mysterious and that’s the magic about him. With that one in particular I kind of worked backwards from “why did Kurt kill himself?” to his birth and worked it back up. Again, he uses archival footage to tell the story of a beloved figure in music.

While the project by director Brett Morgen—part documentary, part concert film, part long-form music video—conveys the contours of this amazing journey, though, ...

“Every artist,” he said, “is a figment of the audience’s imagination.” A few songs are allowed to stretch out—a slow-burn version of “Heroes,” a pummeling rendition of “Hallo Spaceboy” from the 1995 tour with Nine Inch Nails—and time stands still. At its best, the high-velocity, non-stop cutting offers its own kind of insights, as we bounce between Bowie in concert in full Ziggy Stardust regalia—a gender-bending space alien come alive—to shots of him in the most mundane of settings, standing in the customs line at an airport. He speaks of hitting a creative wall and wanting to invent a “new musical language,” which leads to his relocation to Berlin and the release of three groundbreaking albums in the ‘70s. He refers to his “inexhaustible supply of extracurricular thoughts.” Of course, it was Bowie’s commitment to constant creative change and perpetual reinvention that was his most important contribution to pop music, and to the culture in general. Prior to Bowie’s death in 2016, he had met with the singer to present an idea for a sort of alternate-reality biopic; while Bowie didn’t take the bait at the time, after his passing, his manager approached the director and granted him unprecedented access to the artist’s vast archives.

In the opening moments of Brett Morgen's outstanding new documentary Moonage Daydream, David Bowie takes to the stage in full Ziggy Stardust garb, ...

His effectiveness as an actor seemed to depend on his finding a character big enough to hide behind, for example in the 1996 biopic Basquiat, where he caught the eccentric essence of Andy Warhol perfectly. In the documentary, we also hear him talk about his search for meaning, and his nagging sense that something larger was at work in the universe. Musically, meanwhile, his career floundered somewhat in the 1980s, culminating in the disastrous Glass Spider tour, which seemed a bloated parody of the energy and invention of the Ziggy phase. But Bowie was on more solid ground in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), a well-received wartime drama in which he was Jack Celliers, a charismatic Australian PoW who refuses to kowtow to sadistic Japanese guards. By this stage, he was big in America too, and when Bowie moved there in the mid-1970s, he entered a self-destructive but wildly creative phase. Crouching on the stage, he looks bewildered, and speaks with a child-like sense of wonder. The Thin White Duke was on the way, and on two albums, Young Americans and Station to Station, Bowie set the rhythms of radio friendly ‘plastic soul’ to some pretty scorching lyrics. He moved into a flat with Iggy Pop, switched from cocaine to beer, and teamed up with Brian Eno to make the Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger). Bowie was midway through touring that record in the US when he started coming onstage with his hair slicked back, sporting sharp suits and singing white soul numbers. Wherever he was going, it was nowhere ordinary, and in the early 1970s, two soulful and original albums set out his stall. If he looks unearthly now, just imagine the kind of impact he had in 1972, when the order of the day was either cheesy pop or macho guitar bands, and stagecraft was virtually unheard of. He looked like an alien, and was playing a character who claimed to be one.

Brett Morgen's scintillating, psychedelic masterwork 'Moonage Daydream' gives a fresh look at David Bowie's incredible life story.

And you certainly won’t find a bespectacled ‘90s era Bowie [predicting the internet to Jeremy Paxman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHcOs7mhfU), who splutters in disbelief. There’s no trace of a pre-fame David Jones on [the Tonight show in 1964](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ShvccGqsw). [calling out MTV in 1983](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGiVzIr8Qg) for not featuring Black artists. Add to that a stadium-shaking sound mix (props to studio whizz Paul Massey) plus Morgen’s usual kaleidoscopic visual flourishes, and you’ve got yourself an all-out assault on the senses. Instead of answering, he giggles, and announces “there’s a fly in my milk!” A few seconds pass before the smile fades. But off-duty, Morgen portrays a quieter icon – deeply thoughtful, often isolated and with a quirky sense of humour.

Brett Morgen's documentary 'Moonage Daydream' captures David Bowie's eternal legacy in an ambitious and beautifully chaotic style.

The effect is one of distorted chaos, but a chaos that engrosses us in the “Bowie experience” Morgen was aiming for. Death is a funny word, because there’s no spiritual death, there’s just the death of the body. On Moonage Daydream, he lent his talents to create a surround sound system in 12.0, 5.0, Dolby Atmos, and 7.1/5.1 that would “take the audience on a theme park ride”. I am a Capricorn, Sagittarius ascendant, Leo descendant.” And Bowie the relentless artist, who told an audience in Japan in the Eighties: “Don’t waste any day, don’t waste a moment. And I think out of that chaos comes some form of creativity,” says Paul Massey, the sound mixer on Moonage Daydream. When we did the Outside album in 1995, he literally said to me ‘I need to do this album for my own soul, because I feel like I sold out in the 80s.’ And he was painting and doing charcoals of the band as we were improvising.” At that time, Bowie was already a huge star in the UK, having released genre-defying albums like Hunky Dory, The Man Who Sold the World and of course The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. There are practically no moments of silence in the two hours and 15 minutes the film runs, most of it carried by a voiceover of archive interviews with Bowie. To enter the world of Moonage Daydream is to unlearn and learn again who David Bowie was, or maybe what he was. “I sensed from day one that this was an artist to reckon with, and that he was not your typical rock singer, that he was a multifaceted Renaissance man. Rick Wakeman, who was the keyboardist on the album, had refused Bowie’s offer to officially join the Spiders and went with the prog-rock band Yes instead. As such, the film is a colourful collage of sound and vision that plays like Bowie’s unconscious might have; a long music video that stirs the viewer through the inner thoughts of one of the greatest artists of the late 20th century.