Morgen documentary brings rock star Bowie back to Earth
Brett Morgen’s David Bowie documentary “Moonage Daydream” plunges into the mind of the rock star and comes away with a gift of sound and vision.
It goes without saying that Bowie, like his alterego Ziggy Stardust, always seemed to have beamed down from another planet: an elegant extraterrestrial with a spacey schtick that was genuinely convincing. “Moonage Daydream” does plenty to exalt that myth, marveling at this handsome creature and his sly movements, his gender-bending onstage contortions, his otherworldly artistic pursuit.
But what I most liked about Morgen’s film is how, in sticking as closely to Bowie’s own words, thoughts and psychology, it reveals not an alien, but rather a man — an actual and glorious Earthling — so deeply connected and enraptured with the world and all its possibilities that he can’t stop himself from sampling it all, and filtering it through his work.
After Morgen has toured us through much of Bowie’s ravenous spiritual journey, it’s illuminating when Bowie — in a dead serious tone not heard anywhere else in the film — explains his modus operandi not grandly but quotidianly: “I hate to waste days.”
“I’m a collector,” Bowie says in the film, explaining his wide-ranging sources of inspiration. The same may be true for Morgen, the first filmmaker for whom the Bowie estate has opened all its archives of journals, photographs, recordings and unseen concert footage. This gives “Moonage Daydream” a fresh, intimate perspective on a much-documented musician.
Morgen’s approach is about as far away as you can get from a talking-head documentary. He throws that archival stuff — plus countless snippets from other sources — into a kaleidoscopic collider to craft a visceral, impressionistic portrait of Bowie.
Few voices are heard in the film that aren’t clips of Bowie musing. His narration is used less to lay out the chronology of his life than it is to offer a meditation on his life, his art and the experience of “treating myself as a bit of an experiment.”
It’s an approach that inevitably sacrifices context. “Moonage Daydream” suffers for a spell in its lack of any opposition to Bowie’s self-driven narrative. It’s well into the film that cracks begin to emerge — what it means to live, as Bowie says, “like an empty vessel.”
But there are other documentaries that can fill that role. The perspective Morgen seems to be after is Bowie’s, not anyone else’s, and “Moonage Daydream” succeeds spectacularly in burrowing into its subject’s imagination. Bowie — a singer, painter, photographer, actor and world traveler — has interests so wide-ranging that they open countless doors.
Plus, apart from being about the coolest person who ever lived, Bowie is uncommonly thoughtful in analyzing himself.
“Moonage Daydream” finds the slipstream of that reality. I would have done away with the last half hour, when the film takes a more dutiful approach to Bowie’s later chapters. The crescendo of “Moonage Daydream” comes much earlier, in a fit of zeal for day-to-day existence and an impassioned one-word plea from Bowie: “Live!”
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some sexual images/nudity, brief strong language and smoking)
Running time: 2:20
How to watch: In IMAX theaters