Are you ready to dress in your “best starperson outfit”? Next week’s White River Indie Film Festival, at Junction Arts & Media in White River Junction, will feature a Saturday, March 25, screening of the David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream. While the 2022 film has already screened elsewhere in the state and can be streamed for a rental fee, WRIF has found the perfect way to celebrate it: by pairing the showing with a runway costume contest. The upcoming event inspired me to check out this hallucinatory ode to Bowie from director Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck).
The deal
Moonage Daydream throws the standard recipe for music documentaries out the window. It opens with Bowie’s voice intoning about how Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God and humanity spent the 20th century seeking a replacement.
We witness a psychedelic scene apparently set on another planet, followed by a frenetic montage of clips from a century of avant-garde art and historical horrors. Among them is news footage of a young Bowie fan contorted in anguish because she failed to catch her idol at the stage door. And finally we reach a temporary still point: the young Bowie onstage, sleek and androgynous and authoritative and anguished in his own way, performing “All the Young Dudes.”
Moonage Daydream has no on-screen text to ground us in space or time, no talking-head interviews to interpret the footage for us. The closest thing it has to a narrator is Bowie himself. With full access to the artist’s music and personal archives, Morgen has assembled an elaborate tribute to Bowie in visual and aural collage form — a full-immersion experience.
Will you like it?
The first time I watched MTV, in 1983, it might as well have been Bowie TV. Adults and teens alike gathered around the set for “Let’s Dance” and “Modern Love.” We were all mesmerized by Bowie’s cool, new-wave persona of the era, but it wasn’t just a matter of aesthetics. Everything about him felt like a perfect match for the fractured, postmodern nature of the music video itself — a then-new format that would soon become inescapable.
Later on, I would learn that those ’80s dance hits were just the most accessible edge of the Bowie catalog. But watching Moonage Daydream, which pairs some of his greatest songs with trippy montages in the style of early MTV, I felt that old rush again. As the kids say, this movie is a vibe, and a powerful one — an exploration of the future past from the perspective of a rock icon who understood his place in a long lineage of avant-garde artists.
If that description makes Bowie sound grandiose, he doesn’t come off that way. Many rock stars have envisioned themselves as secular deities, but Bowie knew enough about the history of his century to be wary of such pretensions. In one particularly revelatory sound bite, he suggests that the rock stars of his era, himself included, are “false prophets,” glittering masks hiding profound emptiness.
Bowie speaks candidly in the archival footage about using performance for disguise, trickery and play — a shape-shifting mutability that makes him as relevant now as he was in the glam era. But he also speaks of the authentic joy of art making, a search for meaning that has inherent value to him even if the only truth that ever emerges is “chaos and fragmentation.”
Morgen shows us a dazzling array of Bowie’s creative efforts: music, dance, paintings, sculpture, film and theatrical performances. We see him cashing in on his persona, too, selling out stadiums and plugging Pepsi in that famous TV spot with Tina Turner. The documentary doesn’t explore the contradiction between these two faces of Bowie, if there is one. Morgen simply leaves us with an unshakable sense that, while Bowie may not have exemplified artistic purity, his was a life of constant, restless, fruitful creation.
I’ve been avoiding Moonage Daydream because I felt like too casual a Bowie fan to review it with any acumen. By virtue of its format, the documentary leaves out vast swaths of biographical and contextual information, and all I can do is hand-wave you toward other sources that provide more of the story.
But now, having seen the film, I can say that it’s hard to come away feeling like a casual anything. Morgen’s maelstrom of sounds and images captures something essential about Bowie’s mystique; by the end, we understand why the sobbing fan at the stage door called him “magical.” And if it’s all smoke and mirrors? Well, maybe that’s the point.
If you like this, try…
David Bowie: The Last Five Years (2017; HBO Max): Francis Whately’s BBC documentary explores Bowie’s creative output toward the end of his life; it’s part of a trilogy that also delves into his early work.
Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story (2017; tubi, Vudu, rentable): Bowie’s backing band has no real screen time in Moonage Daydream, but this documentary will get you up to speed on the guitarist who helped define his early glam sound.
Stardust (2020; AMC+, Hulu, IFC Films Unlimited, rentable): The artist’s estate didn’t like this drama in which Johnny Flynn plays a young Bowie in the process of crafting the Ziggy Stardust persona, so it features zero Bowie songs. Will we see a better Bowie biopic down the road, or does Moonage Daydream fill that gap just fine?
The original print version of this article was headlined “Moonage Daydream”
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2023.
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