“Who is he? What is he? Where did he come from?” Thus opens Moonage Daydream, the avant-garde documentary made by Brett Morgen about the legendary musician David Bowie. This quote comes from a 1974 Dick Cavett Show on which Bowie was a guest and it perfectly sums up his persona as well as that of Moonage Daydream which are known for being different and mysterious. While there have been several made-for-TV documentaries about him before, there have been few artistically driven films about the subject Rolling Stone once called “the greatest rock star ever.”
Extremely ambitious in scale and scope, Neon’s latest film Moonage Daydream is directed by Academy Award nominee Brett Morgen (Jane). Jane tells the story of Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park; Montage of Heck chronicles the life and career of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. After this death in 2016, this is the first film authorized by David Bowie’s estate itself since his passing in 2016. The director had access to over five million items belonging to Bowie, including drawings, experimental video art, recordings, paintings personal journals and photographs that were previously unknown to all.
The film starts with and ends with pounding pulse beats like those of Bowie’s Hallo Spaceboy from 1995 when his voice can be heard singing at a distance like it came from another planet. Surprisingly enough maybe; it was this song rather than any better-known one that inspired the film’s editing or atmosphere most heavily. For well over two hours you will look up at the vast IMAX screen in awe and watch countless scenes cut together from various moments during Bowie’s brilliant career wondering if director Brett Morgen has held his ray gun against your skull as suggested in some of his lyrics.
It may take some time before everyone warms up to a sensory overload that lasts for 140 minutes, but they also took a while to warm up to Bowie. Moreover, the remarkable thing about Moonage Daydream is how it truly represents the spirit of the confusion, the chaos and the trend follower David Bowie in 1970s. Few music documentaries have ever tried, let alone succeeded in penetrating the soul of their subjects to such an extent.
Even as a movie, it feels entirely appropriate and almost poignant since it does exactly what Bowie did all his life – trying to bring avant-garde into mainstream audiences somehow. Essentially he was an experimental artist at heart who never bothered pleasing his fans with his music. One of things that defined him was that he was impossible to define. He has been called variously a chameleon and every new album saw him completely transform himself and his style. At different times he played rock, then jazz or soul, followed by synth-pop and abstract ambient music before inventing two or three more whole genres.
His influence over many different types of music during his career is insane: glam rock; pop; grunge; alternative; punk (along with other K-Pop years later). The most comfortable place for Bowie was always on society’s margins. One of America’s first celebrities who admitted being bisexual publically, wore dresses and makeup during interviews, and helped redefine gender issues among other things besides sexuality. This statement merely scratches the surface of what constitutes this amazing man’s profession.
That was all to the effect that when Brett Morgen decided he wanted to make something in Bowie’s style as an artist, it could not be a conventional film. Moonage Daydream is like Bowie himself who defies classification. To call it a documentary would be misleading but calling it a movie ‘about David Bowie’ would also not be right. It turns into different things: part mood piece, part concert film and part emotional travelogue among other things. Essentially though, this serves as both a statement of artistic philosophy entirely spoken by Bowie himself and an effort to capture what 1970s pure Bowie would feel like if you put it into your veins.
These include concert footage, interviews on talk shows, home videos, music videos from MTV days gone by, old science fiction movies and pure abstract imagery that represents nothing but imagination itself. At its soundtrack are philosophical ruminations by nobody else but Bowie borrowed from previous recordings. There isn’t any voice-of-god narration contextualizing what we see or telling us definitively about Bowie’s life either. Instead we often get to hear thumping IMAX soundtracks comprised mainly of his hit songs with the occasional image of space or some kind of floating shape; they just sit back quietly for one song and then let it play out again (sometimes referred to as “soundtracking”). This is about as far away from classically narrated BBC documentaries as you can get without turning the channel.
The movie opens with two sentences in which Bowie outlines what it sets out to achieve. The first talks about how civilization has made its biggest mistake ever – choosing order against chaos. In the second one he explains why rock music fascinated him when at a tender age; for instance Fats Domino’s songs didn’t make any sense but he enjoyed them all the same way children love gibberish before they learn meanings of words (“I loved him because I couldn’t understand anything.”). These quotes help explain what Morgen has tried to do.
The film indulges in Bowie’s career as a chameleon, which saw him dress up in extravagant costumes for many of his most successful years and insist that he was an alien rock star from Mars whose mission was to save humanity with the power of rock music. He never tells us what we are seeing and this adds to the enigma. It is just a daydream.
But there is also a sense that as much as Moonage Daydream is an extraordinary artistic achievement, some viewers might feel let down that there isn’t more to it. The film paints a pointillist picture of Bowie’s philosophy but does not show us who he really was. This might be less than sixty seconds dedicated to Bowie’s admission that he could inherit schizophrenia like others in his family, mere background information nonetheless very influential in his work. Basically nothing about his childhood or even what happened during the last 30 years can be found here.
This could prove frustrating for die-hard Bowie fans because they would surely expect more from Morgen having made use of materials from Bowie’s personal archives never seen before by any filmmaker. As such, the movie mainly treads on territory already explored when examining his star persona during the seventies and eighties together with how he used to innovate exceptionally well artistically.
Moreover, conceptually, it makes sense to have Bowie narrate his own film given what it is trying to achieve; but it is a risky move. According to the music critic Peter Doggett’s 2012 book on David Bowie, he was an artist who deliberately and fastidiously fashioned his public image that was sometimes gibberish in interviews, thus building a mythological figure with an unpredictable and incomprehensible persona that would appeal to the audience. In fact within Moonage Daydreams itself as well Bowie’s phrases are self-contradictory: at one moment for instance he says he doesn’t have any human feelings while in another he admits being “very emotional.”
Ultimately this just shows how dedicated this movie is not towards giving an objectively true portrait of Bowie’s life but rather towards the enigmatic, mysterious and even confusing persona that was Ziggy Stardust or David Bowie. This is not the place if you are looking for a straight forward account on his life and work.
However, let us momentarily forget about these fairly abstract discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of Brett Morgen’s experimental filmmaking style. Most importantly though this film enables its viewer get almost a firsthand taste into the thoughts of one who easily could have been – in all honesty – one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. By the final scenes, you might feel like Malcolm McDowell from Clockwork Orange sitting handcuffed to a chair with your eyelids taped open; whilst having your mind fried by sensory overload. But you will also most likely walk out of theater motivated to make changes in your life: stop wasting your time on trivial issues and go out there making something new and great just like every minute of David Bowie’s fascinating existence.
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