David Bowie was a collector of personas, of personalities, of styles, and of sounds. His life was a collage, so it makes sense that the new documentary Moonage Daydream plays like a kaleidoscopic color burst — like a feast, to borrow from the title of a favorite Bowie song, of sound and vision.
Watching the film feels like being dunked in a Bowie submergence tank, especially if you see it in IMAX. The outside world vanishes as the theater shakes and the images cascade, a concert sequence here, a barrage of vintage movie clips there. Among the films director Brett Morgen samples are The Seventh Seal, Blade Runner, A Trip to the Moon, 8 ½, A Clockwork Orange, Onibaba, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and dozens more. Somehow, they all fleetingly speak to the subject, his mercurial nature, and his thematic obsessions.
The film has no narrator and no talking heads, save for Bowie himself and his many interviewers over the years, including Dick Cavett, who seems to find his way into just about any documentary that touches on the ‘70s. The artist’s interlocutors seem intent on cracking the Bowie code, a pointless endeavor in that Bowie himself tried on identities like the suits and dresses in which he performed the rituals of music and life. One interviewer asks a young Bowie if his dazzling kicks are “bisexual shoes.” The response: “No, they’re shoe shoes, silly.” Indeed. When Bowie styled himself as the self-immolating spaceman Ziggy Stardust, he was merely trying on another wardrobe, one with skin and soul. What’s a pair of shoes within that grand scheme?
Moonage Daydream is above all a feat of editing. Morgen, whose previous music docs include Cobain: Montage of Heck and the Rolling Stones portrait Crossfire Hurricane, handles that duty, too. Intercut with the experimental flourishes are audio and video clips of the artist’s observations, providing shape and context to the narrative of his existence. We learn very little of his childhood and early life; nonetheless, the Bowie that emerges here is profoundly lonely, perhaps too much at home in his isolation. For all the exploding color, public idolatry, and success, Moonage Daydream doesn’t back away from an underlying sadness. Bowie tried on his different identities largely because he didn’t much like the one he was born into and raised in.
Moonage Daydream is authorized by the Bowie estate, and Morgen had access to an absurd amount of footage. Bowie was filmed a lot, not just before, during, and after concerts but in more intimate moments — playing with children in India, walking about a Southeast Asian airport in a white linen suit, finding needed solace and creative rebirth in West Berlin. Morgen had the entire Bowie vault at his disposal, and he used it, though he didn’t wade into anything too controversial or problematic. Bowie’s first marriage doesn’t rate a mention. Neither does the cocaine addiction that sent him from his Los Angeles decadence to the artistic rigor of his time in Germany. His fluid sexuality is addressed in broad terms. The Bowie presented in the film is the man the artist chose to present to the world. Moonage Daydream is more experience than story, and parts of the Bowie story didn’t find their way in.
Among the movies inevitably featured in Moonage Daydream is The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg’s thematically rich, dramatically inert 1976 sci-fi film in which Bowie plays the space alien Thomas Jerome Newton, who visits our planet to procure precious resources for his home planet. Instead, he makes millions on patents and gets corrupted by Earth’s temptations, chiefly TV (he watches six of them at a time), gin, and women. Ghostly pale with a shock of orange hair, worn out by the banality of the world, Newton is a quintessential Bowie creation, and very much a part of the man featured in Moonage Daydream, a little bit lost in a world that sticks fiercely to its conventions even as it idolizes its rule breakers.
Then there’s the music, a fierce assemblage of deep cuts and hits, studio remixes and concert gems. The soundtrack checks in at two hours and 20 minutes, and it warrants repeated listens. “I am a D.J., I am what I play,” he belts on “D.J.,” one song that gets the remix treatment here. The song, from 1979’s Lodger album, is actually a takedown of DJ culture, but in its own way, it speaks for Bowie. “My work is not me,” he says in the film, but Bowie’s music goes a long way toward capturing the multitudes he contains.
In this sense, Moonage Daydream is a portrait of a slippery chameleon, slipping in and out of those aforementioned wardrobes and personas. Looking for earnest glam rock? Try some Ziggy Stardust. Ambient noise? Dig into the Berlin Trilogy. He served up delicious R&B with the Young Americans album and took a self-aware turn into Top 40 with Let’s Dance (the film features a killer live performance of the title song, during which he moves like a demon and holds several thousand fans in the palm of his hand). Near the end of his life, he even indulged his yen for jazz on Blackstar, released two days before his death in January 2016.
To watch Moonage Daydream is to take this journey straight, no chaser. Even Cobain: Montage of Heck, Morgen’s adventurous 2015 portrait of the late Nirvana leader, used talking heads to guide the viewer from station to station. Moonage Daydream, by contrast, is its own narrator, its own road map, and its own DJ. For all his considerable technique, Morgen pulls off a filmmaker’s greatest magic trick. As Bowie comes into multicolored focus, the filmmaker disappears.
Chris Vognar is a culture writer living in Houston.
