Mark Reviews Movies: MOONAGE DAYDREAM

Moonage Daydream, NEON

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 15, 2022

While it will come as little surprise, the best moments of Moonage Daydream, director Brett Morgen's free-flowing and semi-experimental documentary about David Bowie, are the ones with Bowie on stage through the decades. Morgen was granted access to who-knows-how-many hours of archival footage from the personal collection of the late musician—a description which understates his creative output and influence, to be sure, although, to be fair, it is the music that drives this movie. We get scenes of Bowie backstage, in various studios for photography sessions and working on his own paintings, and traveling the world. There are assorted television interviews, in which we can hear how Bowie's philosophy on art and life and himself changed over the course of his career.

All of this is, perhaps, vital to understanding Bowie, although those interviews certainly put a little kink in the works of that part of Morgen's goal. Watching the movie—often unmoored from a strict and set timeline of Bowie's life—and listening to the musician talk in snippets of philosophical musings, one becomes distinctly aware of the filmmaker's hand.

In addition to directing, Morgen also serves as the editor here—a task that, since most of this movie is in its editing, took about four years according to the press notes, which should give one a broad idea of just how much footage the filmmaker had to examine. Because there's only a broad chronological structure here that the director often shatters, we have no way of telling when and in what context Bowie said any of the things we hear him saying in the movie.

Beyond that, Morgen ensures to make the point that Bowie spent the early part of his career rather famously adopting various personas. That becomes a sticking point in multiple TV appearances, because it's almost inevitable that the interviewer asks if Bowie is being sincere with his answers or still playing some character. One of the funnier moments has Bowie responding to that very question with one word: "Yes." From the clip we see, it seems pretty obvious that Bowie means the answer and its further explanation as a cheeky joke. One wonders if Morgen takes it a bit too seriously.

Most of this documentary—when it isn't giving us some excellent concert footage that's backed by new and vibrant mixes of some famous and less-well-known Bowie tunes—amounts to a sort of free-wheeling biography. The goal isn't a chronology of what happened when and where, although Morgen includes some apparently required details about Bowie's parents and childhood—perfectly "ordinary." No, the real attempt here is to assert some final, all-encompassing philosophy about the meanings of life and art directly from Bowie's mouth.

For his part, Morgen frames all of those ideas, often disconnected from the man saying them on the soundtrack, amidst a collection of media. Some of that is directly relevant to the subject, such as the bookend scenes that use the music video for Bowie's song "Blackstar" (the first single from his final album), which envisions the corpse of an astronaut on the moon being discovered by some new species of human, and a kaleidoscope of performance photographs, doubled and quadrupled and mirrored in bright colors.

Other sections of it incorporates clips from various movies—the ones Bowie appeared in, yes, but also scenes from assorted science-fiction movies as ""Hallo Spaceboy" blares on the soundtrack. It's a bit on-the-nose, although not nearly as much as a later montage of Bowie dancing through the decades while his '80s incarnation sings "Let's Dance." Occasionally, Morgen abandons the archives entirely, offering up some animated, psychedelic pools of some multi-colored oily substance or a field of stars revealing a portal to some new plane of understanding—or something like that.

There's little avoiding the idea that, nearly from the start, this is Morgen's show. It's an impressive feat of editing, especially after learning how long it took him to put it together, and an intriguing stream-of-conscious reflection on what the filmmaker sees or wants to see in Bowie. It often, though, feels as if Morgen's technique is either intentionally trying to overwhelm or accidentally overshadowing the movie's own subject. He's not putting words in Bowie's mouth, obviously, but it's his idea of what Bowie represents that inspires which interviews are used, drives the narrative, and, ultimately, narrows the scope of Bowie's career and influence to some thoughts about making the most of life.

The good news is that it's almost impossible to overshadow Bowie when he's singing and performing, and the movie's soundtrack is a marvel to hear. The song selection is likely as one would expect, but the novelty is how Morgen and his team seamlessly switch between and/or meld studio recordings and audio from live performances. That element is an undeniable accomplishment, and the concert footage is great enough to make one wish the filmmaker had the patience to stick with it more often and consistently.

Here, then, is an exceptional musical experience, a somewhat hypnotic but often distracting visual one, and an iffy assessment of the person who made that music. Moonage Daydream is a sincere tribute to its subject. It just happens to be exclusively a tribute to Morgen's envisioning and interpretation of Bowie, and ultimately, that comes across as an unnecessary limitation on such an artist.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)