MOONAGE DAYDREAM
Cert 15 ★★★★★ In cinemas now
HERE’S another film that may sound a little familiar. More than six years after we lost David Bowie, we have yet another rockumentary about the pop icon.
But Brett Morgen (director of the great 2015 Kurt Cobain film) has something his predecessors craved – unfettered access to Bowie’s extensive back catalogue.
This engrossing and wildly inventive film smashes the template of the music documentary from the beginning by opening with a lesser-known song from the later period of his career – Hallo Spaceboy, a great track from 1995 album Outside.
The next 140 minutes are a full-on assault on the senses as Morgen weaves candid home movies with little-seen concert performances and clips taken from films, some that Bowie acted in and others that influenced his career.
Other documentaries have made much of the various reinventions that marked his career, but Morgen’s loosely chronological musical collage serves to give us a sense of continuity.
As the late Mavis Nicholson points out in a perceptive interview, Bowie used himself as a painter uses a canvas. And, to Morgen, Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke are two sides of the same coin.
While we hear plenty from Bowie, his voice culled from various interviews, we don’t have the usual chats with friends or family members. This is a film that concentrates more on the art than the personal life of the artist.
Slick editing links live footage of the major tours, taking us from early 70s Ziggy Stardust performances, to 1974’s Diamond Dogs tour, to thrilling live takes of later hits such as Heroes and Let’s Dance.
Morgen also focuses on Bowie’s devoted fans and explores the cultural importance of his gender-fluid image. “You don’t have to be bent to wear make-up,” says one gruff-sounding young devotee. In the early 1970s, this sounded dangerously progressive.
Not all of Bowie’s greatest hits make the cut but Morgen finds room for a long sequence cut to DJ, a thumping dance track from 1979.
It sounds like it was recorded last week.