Moonage Daydream (2022)
dir. Brett Morgen
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2022 Neon
With Moonage Daydream, documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen has reinvented the form, synthesizing a kaleidoscope of images and sounds from the life and work of David Bowie into a vibrant, electrifying experience. Like its subject’s nonconformist, taboo-smashing body of work, Morgen’s 140-minute tone poem meditation on one of the most sui generis artists who has ever lived is breathtaking in its scope and originality. Morgen’s film is one of the best of the year. David Bowie pulses in every frame, reminding us from beyond the grave that we’ll never see his like on this planet again.
Upon reflection, Moonage Daydream is (slightly) more conventional than it at first seems. Beneath the surface of the film’s elliptical, almost phantasmagorical tapestry is a roughly chronological examination of Bowie’s career over the course of about 30 years. This is the first documentary about the glam rock pioneer that is officially authorized by the estate of the artist, who died in 2016 from liver cancer.
Morgen had access to five million items from Bowie’s archives, which included paintings, recordings, and photographs never before seen by the public. The director – whose work includes the flamboyant 2002 doc The Kid Stays in the Picture and the contemplative 2017 rumination on the life work of Jane Goodall, titled, simply, Jane – spent over four years working on Moonage Daydream. Morgen served on the film as producer, writer, director, and principal editor.
Foremost on Morgen’s mind, which he explores through Bowie’s own obsession with the subject, is the mystery of how art is made and why we make it. In Bowie’s own words, he wanted to use art to excavate not only his own artistic inclinations, but society’s relationship with both art and the artist. In one audio clip, the poly-hyphenate musician-painter-actor pontificates that artists don’t exist, at least not in the way they are perceived by the world-at-large.
When the audience begins the process of absorbing the work and persona of an artist, their idea of that person changes the artist into something new, beyond the control of the artist. Moonage Daydream adds to that phenomenon, as the popular image of Bowie and what his work means continues to evolve even after his death.
The picture spends the first third of its runtime heavily focused on Bowie’s at-the-time revolutionary embrace of an androgynous persona that helped the process of normalizing queer attitudes and sensibilities in early 1970s society. The irony is not lost on me that David Bowie, as a straight man, should occupy such a central position in the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation.
Bowie himself was slippery on the question of his own sexuality, claiming to be bisexual numerous times over the first decade of his meteoric rise as a luminary in the glam/art rock scene. (He claimed on many occasions to have met his first wife, Mary Angela Barnett, while they were “fucking the same bloke,” but confessed in a 1983 Rolling Stone interview that he was, in fact, “always a closet heterosexual.”)
By today’s standards, it would be inexcusable for a straight man to use queerness as a costume like this. As a society, we have transitioned to valuing authentic lived experiences and insisting that storytelling about a historically marginalized group of people come from members of said group. By most accounts though, Bowie did at least experiment with his sexuality – despite the ignorant cries of fundamentalist/repressive types, sexuality is a spectrum, not a binary, so we’re all at least a little queer.
It might have been a wee bit of self-promotion on his part, but Bowie saw an opportunity, coming out of the oppressive rigidity of the 1950s, to challenge the status quo and to give the square community a good case of the freak-out. It worked. His popularity being undeniable, conservative broadcaster types in suits and ties gave him a platform to show the world that one could present in any way one felt most authentic.
(Morgen includes an amusing example of one of these exchanges when an interviewer asks Bowie about the outlandish platform shoes he’s wearing. “And how about the shoes? Are those men’s shoes, or women’s shoes, or bisexual shoes,” the interviewer asks. Bowie cheekily responds: “They’re shoe shoes, silly!”)
One of the most fascinating bits of audio from Bowie included in the documentary concerns the transgressive artist’s views on rock-and-roll itself. He talks about hearing this burgeoning art form as an adolescent – name-checking Fats Domino in particular – and explains that he immediately wanted to be a part of it. He couldn’t even always understand what the rockers were saying, but that didn’t matter. The electric feeling of this form of artistic expression called to him.
These reminiscences from the Suffragette City singer provide an apt segue to Morgen’s use of Bowie’s music within the film. The pulse pounding tracks from Bowie’s discography provide a wall-to-wall soundscape within Moonage Daydream to highlight his musical genius. Morgen, with the help of Bowie’s own long-time producer, Tony Visconti, curates dozens and dozens of live performance clips, showcasing the artist’s unique magnetic and hypnotic stage presence.
Bowie used rock-and-roll – as well as painting, acting, and photography – in an attempt to capture timeless truths about the nature of the cosmos. Some of the more mystical audio passages from Bowie that Morgen includes in the film easily fit into a bong-rip philosophy ethos. (There’s no way viewing Morgen’s psychotropic wonderland of a movie wouldn’t be elevated with the aid of “chemical enhancement.”)
These trippy insights from the inventor of the Ziggy Stardust persona put me in mind of transcendental meditation adherent David Lynch. The director of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet has talked at length about the idea that there is a collective cosmic unconscious and that an artist’s job is to find a way to tap into it for inspiration and to explore universal truths. He uses the metaphor of a creative idea being like a big fish, and using transcendental meditation as a sort of bait to hook those elusive ideas.
I’ll note that Lynch and Bowie worked together, the latter appearing briefly in Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as Special Agent Phillip Jeffries. (“Well now, I'm not gonna talk about Judy. In fact, we're not gonna talk about Judy at all. We're gonna keep her out of it.”) There are also several clips within Moonage Daydream of Bowie working on a stage version of The Elephant Man, in which he portrayed John Merrick. In 1980, Lynch directed a film version of The Elephant Man. The two men seemed to run along parallel lines of unconventional artistic thought and philosophy.
Brett Morgen has crafted a transcendent pure cinema sensory experience of David Bowie in Moonage Daydream. His film is by turns mysterious, revelatory, contemplative, and deeply aesthetically rich and pleasing. It is of a piece with Bowie’s own career. It’s easy to imagine that this is the movie Bowie might have made about himself, had he set out to do so.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- It was so refreshing to see a doc that wasn’t merely an endless parade of talking head interviews. It’s true that these sorts of archival documentaries are becoming more common, but Morgen has created something truly transcendent with Moonage Daydream.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The breadth and variety of the clips used in the film is extraordinary. Morgen uses extensive silent film as well as other movie clips to help build his dialectical montage. He absolutely deserves a Best Editing Oscar nomination when awards season rolls around.
- A moment in the film that brought a smile to my face was Bowie riding down an escalator (in Japan, I think), and each person looking back in surprise as they pass him on the other side of the escalator.
- “I never asked Jesus for a thing.” Bowie, in the quote of the movie (for me).
- There is nothing more exciting than seeing an artist define an archetype that has become ubiquitous in the culture. Here, it’s Bowie inventing the glam rock god Ziggy Stardust.
- I would have liked more on Bowie’s crisis of drug addiction during his Thin White Duke era.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this at The Texas Theatre on a Friday night. It was a small crowd. Moonage Daydream is currently available in select theaters. It is expected to be available for streaming on HBO Max in the spring of 2023.