How much you like David Bowie, and when you started liking him, will determine how you respond to Moonage Daydream. Written, directed, produced, and edited by Brett Morgen, the documentary provides an exhaustive account of very specific sections of Bowie’s career. What it doesn’t do is offer a convincing portrait of a notorious shape-shifter.
You’d never know it from this documentary, but Bowie was a divisive figure in the rock world. His early efforts were distinctly folk or pop, catchy enough at times (“The Man Who Sold the World”) but often just average. In his Hunky Dory phase he started appropriating glam rock, leading to accusations of selling out. Each new musical shift brought criticism as well as praise. The truth is, Bowie did not have a great rock voice, relying instead on personas and genre — spaceman, bisexual, plastic soul, krautrock — to push across his material.
Morgen buys into all the space crap, in particular “Space Oddity.” That’s partly due to the fact that the best material here comes from D.A. Pennebaker’s concert documentary Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (filmed in 1973 and released in 1979). On the other hand, Bowie not only participated in, but encouraged the visual documentation of his life. It’s amazing to see the same shot — Bowie from behind, the back of his head center frame, walking backstage — tour after tour, year after year, country after country.
Moonage Daydream takes a scattershot approach to its subject. Biographical details emerge slowly, based on Bowie’s own comments about his institutionalized half-brother, his emotionally distant mother, and his artistic ambitions. Through tape recordings, Bowie offers what amounts to a running narration in which he makes broad but not very helpful generalizations about art, music, love.
Morgen buttresses these with imagery, a staggering array of movie slips, concert footage, advertisements, posters, paintings, animation, talk shows, newspaper headlines, magazine covers, light shows, and umpteen shots of ecstatic audience members.
Some of Morgen’s choices are distressingly on point. Should Bowie mention a ray gun, Morgen will offer a 1950s sci-fi clip of, you guessed it, a ray gun in action. On the other hand, pronouncements like, “I’ve been esoteric all my life,” are likely to result in clips from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. It’s up to you to figure out how Land Without Bread or A Night Out influenced Bowie. Or why they’re here.
Morgen includes a lot of Bowie’s music, but it’s mostly snippets: concert excerpts, video footage, etc. He makes almost no attempt to explain how Bowie worked: how he created, how he collaborated, how he refined.
The director focuses predominately on Bowie’s glam rock phase, and the artist’s later reaction to that style. Whole stretches of his career are ignored. “Changes” is relegated to the end of the closing credits. Where is “Fame” or “Young Americans”? For that matter, where is his first wife Angela?
Morgen is entitled to his own views about Bowie, even if they skew away from the musician’s most popular work. I’m grateful to hear a complete, live version of “Heroes,” and a bit miffed “Suffragette City” was left out. If you’re a Bowie fan, you’ll have your own pleasures and regrets.
David Bowie was a considerably more sophisticated artist than Moonage Daydream suggests. His reach was wider, his tastes more complex, and his relationship to the industry more conflicted. It’s too bad Morgen couldn’t have aimed higher.
Photos courtesy Neon.
Credits
Written, directed, and edited by Brett Morgen.
Produced by Brett Morgen.
Re-recording mixers: Paul Massey David Giammarco.
Supervising sound and music editor: John Warhurst.
Supervising sound editor: Nina Hartstone.
Music produced by Tony Visconti.
