Mark Reviews Movies: MOBY DOC

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 27, 2021

The actual narrative of Moby Doc, a documentary about the life story of the musician Moby, is pretty straightforward and not particularly surprising. It's never the story that really matters, though. It's the way that story is told, and director Rob Gordon Bralver's biographical film is strange, thoughtful, and bluntly honest.

The center of it, obviously, is Moby himself, who not only provides the narration and a series of interviews (some of them in the typical sit-down-for-the-camera fashion, although a few have a bit of a twist), but also offers illustrations, models, and dramatizations of his history. There are several staged scenes, too, of Moby talking to a disinterested therapist, of him in a meditative state in the desert, or of the musician having a pleasant chat with Death. He's a fan, Moby tells the haunting figure with a distorted, shrieking voice.

In case it isn't clear from that encounter, the musician is contemplative throughout this film—and not just about his own life. There are questions here that Moby poses about the meaning of an individual's life, the sheer insignificance of any person on the grand scale of the history and future of the universe, and how anyone is supposed to make sense or find happiness within the context of such existential uncertainties.

His own life—born into an abusive marriage, raised within a broken family, living an impoverished life—possesses its own inexplicable and contradictory questions. How was he happier without any fame or money than he was when fame and money finally arrived? Moby scraped by making music for small clubs and recording songs that he gave away on the subway, but the real misery, from his perspective at least, only came when he was famous—the drinking, the drugs, the humiliating mornings after, the sinking feeling that people stopped liking him as an artist and as a person, if they ever really liked him at all.

The tone of Moby Doc isn't downtrodden, because Moby has found some peace—with the key word being "some"—in sobriety and introspection. The approach doesn't feel like navel-gazing, because the musician and Bralver offer so many surreal and ironic touches to the material. That method keeps just enough distance, rejecting hollow reverence for the man, but it doesn't diminish the sincerity of Moby assessing the person he was, is, and could be.

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