Review

Moonage Daydream, review: a kaleidoscopic odyssey through David Bowie’s brilliance

This documentary about the late superstar is a true feast of sound and vision. Pack up the laptop and get to a proper cinema

David Bowie in Moonage Daydream
David Bowie in Moonage Daydream

How much David Bowie is it possible to pack into one feature documentary? Or how much David Bowie-ness, let’s say? Moonage Daydream, a wildly creative tribute to everything Bowie achieved over four and a half decades, sets a sky-high bar as cinematic fan-service, and it leaves you buzzing. 

Brett Morgen’s film sparks up with enough ideas and juxtapositions, thrilling excerpts of live performance, and simply, so much Bowie, it’s an experience to greedily inhale in a packed cinema. Bowie’s longstanding producer Tony Visconti (who has remastered the songs for surround sound) deserves nothing less – if I ever catch anyone watching it through tinny earbuds on a laptop, rather than seizing the chance to let it loudly electrify them on the biggest screen possible, there will be hell to pay. 

Morgen is well-known on the documentary scene – he co-directed the Robert Evans insider memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002), and won Emmys for both Jane (2017) (about the anthropologist Jane Goodall) and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015). The latter film was hailed as the definitive Cobain doc, and went some way, with its animated interludes and previously unreleased home-video footage, towards the kaleidoscopic collage Morgen now lands upon.

Morgen sat down with interview subjects for Cobain, though, and it’s the removal of those altogether here that loosens the final strictures, formally speaking. Instead, it manages to free-associate, rock out, let Bowie seem in charge of the narrative, and to trace the periods of his career with a crisp sense of chronology that never dawdles. These are pretty impressive feats for a music doc to juggle, while also zipping through at speed and feeling way, way shorter than 140 minutes. Disciples could genuinely watch this thing all day.

Bowie’s archive was opened up wholesale to Morgen, and there’s not only a wealth of essential live performances included – including long-lost footage from his 1978 Isolar II tour gig at Earl’s Court – but all the hoopla around them, hyped fans in cosplay setting the scene before his concerts all over the world. Scan the faces in the queue outside one of the early London shows, and there’s a young Mick Jagger lurking, during a giddy opening salvo, set to “Hello Spaceboy”, which works like gangbusters to get you in the mood. 

David Bowie in Moonage Daydream
David Bowie in Moonage Daydream

Around 45 songs drive the film forward, some complete, some firing up halfway and segueing into the beginning of the next on stage – like the epic croon of All The Young Dudes, with a chaser of that catchy shrug about daily apocalypse, Oh You Pretty Things!. There’s a version of Let’s Dance I massively prefer to the one on record. We get – thank God – Life on Mars, in the incandescent turquoise suit Bowie had designed by his lover/protégé Freddie Burretti.

The film’s patterning is rarely less than hypnotic. It also amounts to scholarship, a magpie homage to a magpie artist, with its tips of the hat to such varied sources as Kandinsky, The Red Shoes, Pollock, Bacon, the Beatles. Morgen’s insights come to you from stellar mash-ups of sound and vision. 

Speaking of which, Sound and Vision’s the perfect song to demonstrate the suggestive synaesthesia of Bowie’s compositional style, lyrics, and instrumentation. “Blue, blue, electric blue, that’s the colour of my room,” we hear him sing, as bright cloud-bursts erupt in a lush animated display, before other colours shuffle their way in. 

Moonage Daydream
Moonage Daydream

How brilliant, too, to excerpt the legendary one-take piano solo Mike Garson used to jazz up Aladdin Sane, and have that underscore the jittery days in the mid-1970s when Bowie was limousine-touring on too much cocaine, turning TV interviews into peculiar combat. It’s quite a wow when Space Oddity comes on – actually late in the running time – over a shot of Bowie as a toddler, not yet in orbit.

“I went to school. I ate,” was his summation of his own deeply ordinary childhood, before the itch took over to keep remaking himself, again and again, in the various guises we all know – glam-rock messiah, space alien, dance lizard, cyberguru. His affinity with the pre-Y2K event horizon of the 1990s is perfectly captured, in a fragmentary rush of megabytes and digital rain. 

The film doesn’t spare Bowie from critique – the “pendulum swing”, as he puts it, between opposite creative poles, meant that the esoteric experiments of the Berlin years in the late Seventies pinged him back way too far towards slick populism, and his feeblest work, in the next decade. But we don’t dwell. We celebrate. We mourn. We let him mesmerise us all over again.


15 cert, 140 min. In cinemas from Friday

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