Film Review: "Moonage Daydream"
CARLOS ALVAREZ | SEPT. 28, 2022 | ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
There was a rather anesthetizing quality to Brett Morgen’s “Moonage Daydream” trailer that built an unexplainable excitement which only fermented in the week that I waited for it to begin showing near me. Although I truly had no way of anticipating the ebullient experience that I was soon to have in Sun-Ray’s second auditorium, it is clear to me that Morgen built this documentary around David Bowie and his enigma opposed to fitting his life into the mold of the modern formula implemented in documentary filmmaking.
To even describe the film as a documentary is a bold choice. If I were to put it in another form, it feels more like an exploration of Bowie’s aura and the iconography that his music accompanied in larger popular culture than a strictly narrative depiction of his life and work. Consisting of restored concert footage, television interviews, scattered film clips, and Bowie’s visual art, the film is less linear than it is spiritual. Kaleidoscopic, Stan Brakhage-like sequences paint the transcendental emotion flowing from Bowie’s music and send the viewer through caverns of radiant beauty.
Much of my appreciation for the film, beyond the sensory overload, was in the sheer amount of time it must have taken to edit and organize. Utilizing simple techniques like effervescently colorizing photos from Bowie’s performances, the film feels extensively curated in terms of what made the final cut. Perhaps an even more daunting thought is how much longer the film could have been and may have initially been considering all the footage that was restored.
The most interesting choice that I continually found myself coming back to was the use of footage from a variety of different films to describe Bowie. From 1963’s “8 ½” to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” to even the 1948 classic musical “The Red Shoes,” the film’s roots in cinema history add one of its most unique touches. So much of Bowie’s persona is cemented into the zeitgeist and the film’s use of adjacent popular culture works almost like a play on the modern needle drop. Instead of playing a famous song to elicit a sense of nostalgia, the visuals are the preexisting aspect that can be outsourced for their personal meanings.
Morgen trades the traditional talking head interview subject for Bowie himself and at no point uses any loved ones or historians to accentuate his significance; this is from the beginning a film about Bowie, told by Bowie. So much of Bowie’s enigma exists to this day in the mystery around who he was off the stage. Between moving from country to county and his various encounters with religion and sexuality, the modern documentary structure of telling sequenced events through modern interpretation and research does not allow for proper illumination of his character.
Structurally, the film also clashes with the modern documentary fabric and experiments with less form in its narrative. Like the mists and clouds that obscured Bowie on stage, Morgen’s structure for the film is far less focused on key events than it is on fine details. While still being loosely linear and depicting Bowie’s internal monologue throughout his progression to the level of stardom he is remembered for, there is less emphasis on each album and each individual concert. The viewer is almost put into Bowie’s mind in that way, as the dates and time periods do not penetrate his memory the way his feelings do.
I cannot help but emphasize my appreciation for the lack of conventionality in this approach to covering one of the most famous musicians to ever live. Although I take no specific issue in the modern documentary form, I admire far more when films can manipulate their resources perfectly to avoid these pedestrian patterns. For one of the most documented musicians in history, it simply doesn’t not make sense to conventionally cover his rise to fame with outside sources and visual recreation; Bowie’s life was in so many ways visual as it was audial and the value of that is infused into every frame of this. Through the painstaking process of restoring thousands of hours of footage for this, Morgen knew not that he could create the answers that he was looking for, but rather that Bowie had already laid them out for him.
Though I am not an avid Bowie listener or fan, I found this to be rather delightful and enjoyed the liberties it took to properly pay tribute to Bowie. The film feels easily divisive and I believe the vast majority of people will either deeply love it or resent it with striking passion, but its inner workings as an experimental mood board of a documentary entertained me to say the least. The credits do not roll on “Moonage Daydream” as a retelling but rather as a glimpse into the mind of a man who loved life and sought to constantly create, express and feel more. In that pursuit, I believe it is more than a success.