Moonage Daydream

Brett Morgen's 140 minute long Moonage Daydream, is a neon-soaked nonlinear joyride through the late David Bowie's life and career, concentrating on his personal philosophy to life and art, as narrated wholly and solely (to its detriment) by the man himself. Bowie freaks and acolytes will I imagine, bow down before it, declaring it the best thing since sliced bread and vinyl music. I on the other hand, as a fan of his music, found its perspective of the great man and musician to be too narrow and dare I say it, despite some exhilarating sequences, even boring in places.

The documentary which was apparently approved by the Bowie family and estate, was clearly a labour of love for director/producer/editor Morgen, who has assembled some amazing footage of Bowie in and out of concert and has been very creative in its depiction onscreen. But I for one became entirely sick of hearing Bowie drone on endlessly and singularly about his thoughts on time, aging, art (why only painting?) and mortality. Can I make it very clear here that I'm not being critical of Bowie himself. This is entirely criticism of Morgen's interpretive treatment of the dead musician. For all we know, Bowie himself may have been aghast, at being treated in this sort of hyper - reverential manner.

I personally wanted to hear his thoughts on influences arising from his collaborations with a vast array of other musicians and producers. I wanted to at least hear something about how his life may have been affected by his his marriages and his children. For those like me again, who might be interested in his notable side ventures into acting? Nothing ... nothing at all! Morgen portrays him as this incredibly gifted, solitary traveller endlessly (and repetitively) traversing the ends of the earth seeking spiritual and artistic enlightmennt. No one else is invited to the gig. We see some vision of notables and stalwarts such as Mick Ronsen, Brian Eno and second wife Iman (ever so briefly), but we never hear from them. It becomes quite frustrating.

Moonage Daydream is a complicated, monumental paen to a hugely gifted artist, but for all its fine production values and occasional interludes of genuine excitement, I found it oddly one - dimensional and repetitive and ultimately failing to do justice to the man.

'Moonage Daydream' is a not-really-documentary about David Bowie, as it doesn't follow the traditional talking heads of friends, family and colleagues. It's also not a concert film, although it does have some live concert footage, apparently much of it previously unseen. Directed by Brett Morgen (who did 'Montage of Heck' about Kurt Cobain and 'Crossfire Hurricane' about The Rolling Stones), it's also not wall-to-wall songs - I'd say there were only ~10 songs played in full, with lots of others used as transitions.

The film does well to show his impact on his fans, with bits and pieces from outside shows and plenty of crowd closeups during the live bits. There's plenty of archival Bowie interviews, much of it overlaid with other visuals of him or with the psychedelic "screensaver"-type CGI. It's edited well, so it feels like he's talking directly to you, rather than an interviewer. Lots of his other art - paintings, video-snippets, dance - edited in too.

It's sort-of chronological, starting in ~'72 and the Ziggy Stardust era, covering up to the early '90s, but some of the interviews jump to an older Bowie, so he can juxtapose himself and some of the comments/views from his younger self. He was certainly a bit of a mystery and for a lot of the film comes across as someone just trying to find his place in the world. Good to see some of his reasoning around certain things and his genius definitely shines through. Hard to believe he's already been gone almost 7 years.

It was always going to be hard to capture David Bowie's life and career in documentary format, as even the standard, talking head interviews + archive footage in chronological order would fail to capture all the important information in just over two hours. More troubling, however, is the fact that an ordinary documentary wouldn't do justice to who Bowie was/wasn't/might've been. He had an eccentric and still somewhat mysterious life, adopting different personas that all had some relation to his true self, yet never seemed to perfectly reflect it.

This all makes the fairly abstract approach in Moonage Daydream feel mostly appropriate. The only voiceover you get is from archival David Bowie interviews, and even then are they rarely presented in a way most interviews in documentaries are presented. Right near the end, there's a single shot of Bowie looking just over the camera, at the interviewer, and it's such a jarring moment because of how "ordinary" it looks.

Snippets of interviews are instead mixed with concert footage, archive/news footage, shots from music videos, photos, some animation, and clips from films - some of which starred Bowie. The visual style does feel close to relentless, but never becomes exhausting. For as much as I really liked Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain documentary from 2015, that one was an assault on the senses at times (but likely intentionally so). Moonage Daydream is a little mellower and less in your face, but I think it lacks the hard-hitting emotion of Cobain: Montage of Heck.

For as great as Moonage Daydream is at capturing a good deal of Bowie's music and style, I don't think it's a slam-dunk, and part of that comes from it not making me feel as emotional as I'd expected it would. Maybe that was never the intention, and maybe instead, things were purposefully kept a little abstract. Still, it never went so far as to feel cold or too distant, and it remained engaging at a relatively lengthy 135 minutes (the perfect length; I think any longer and it may have become fatiguing).

I don't think all David Bowie fans will love this, because it doesn't always explain events clearly and spends a good deal of time on some of the less well-known periods of his life. But if you approach it with the knowledge that it's not an "ordinary" documentary the same way your average Bowie album is not an "ordinary" album, you should find a good deal to appreciate and enjoy.

As a huge Bowie fan I really wanted to like this.

Unfortunately the movie is quite flawed:

• asynchronous storyline or not? Footage from different eras are mixed throughout the movie, but the director is also trying to tell a story of different periods.

• focus on only 3 periods only. The 3 periods in the storyline are basically Ziggy/ Aladin Sane, Berlin & Commercial 80's. Nothing about pre-Ziggy, soul period (young Americans), or after '85 (1.outside, tin Machine, hours, reality/heathen, the quiet period after heart attack that nobody really knows anything about, or comeback/ next Day/ Blackstar/ death. The movie is 2,5 hours long, so you would expect some more attention to the lesser known work & periods.

• doubling footage. Some footage shown multiple times, like the elevators in Japan. Why? Is there not more different footage available?

• lack of new footage: many scenes already shown in multiple Bowie documentaries, e.g. Amstel Hotel and the interview with the English bloke. Again; is there really nothing new of less known to find about one of the most famous guys of the last decades?

• footage of influences. A lot of footage of movies Bowie apparently liked, like Voyage to the Moon, Nosferatu, Metropolis. However without source or any explanation or even context and in overabundance.

As a Bowie fan I appreciate that a story is not always linear, and I appreciate artistic & weird movies too. But this one felt too much like a lazily put together collage of footage that was most easily found.

Saw this in IMAX 2d. Loud, vivid, it's not a biography, it's an exploration and celebration of Bowie's life, art, and music. Made up of clips cleverly edited together and enhanced to make this a cinematic experience . See it as big and loud as you can and get lost in Bowie. It needs to be three hours longer to fit in everything the stuff others are moaning about not being there. I'd happily have done another 3 hours of this. Came out wanting to listen to all the album's again and smoke cigarettes and bleach my hair and wear a raincoat. Everything i wanted to be in the eighties, I want again after watching Bowie come to life once more.