The Cannes midnight premiere of Brett Morgen’s lavish David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream started slightly late. Why? Because the director was out on the red carpet, dancing wildly to a booming soundtrack of classic Bowie hits. This high-energy display was charming, hilarious and very Cannes, where partying is key to the festival brand. But a cynic might have taken it as a cautionary hint of Morgen’s own pop-star ambitions, putting himself front and centre of a big, splashy film about a complex. multi-layered avant-rock chameleon.
Freewheeling through Bowie’s vast musical legacy, Moonage Daydream is an opulent IMAX-sized spectacle heavily driven by the late starman’s live performances across the decades, all overlaid with sparkly new visual treatments and densely woven with clips from interviews, music videos, feature films and more. For hardcore fans, the buried treasure in this labyrinthine velvet goldmine is the previously unseen concert footage and photos from the singer’s personal collection. Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti is behind the thunderous high-spec audio mix, so the whole project has an official seal of approval.
There is a mass of material here, some of it magnificent, some shapeless and superfluous, hence that distended triple-vinyl concept-album runtime of 2 hours 20 minutes. Heading to further festivals after Cannes, including the opening night slot at Sheffield Docfest in June, Moonage Daydream adds little new to the growing canon of posthumous Bowie scholarship. Even so, the legendary rocker is more popular than ever since his shock death from cancer in 2016, spawning a boom in museum shows, films, album box sets, stage musicals, tribute concerts and more. Lush, loud and sexy, Morgen’s impressionistic memorial is likely to do brisk business when it opens theatrically in September.
Moonage Daydream has been in gestation for five years, since soon after Bowie’s death. Morgen actually met the rock legend back in 2007 to propose a documentary collaboration which never bore fruit. But the Oscar and Emmy-winning director has since proved highly adept at assembling archive-driven music films with an imaginative slant and an immersive feel, notably the Rolling Stones’ performance anthology Crossfire Hurricane (2012) and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015). There are stylistic echoes of both here.
Morgen has wisely not attempted a factual biopic approach with Moonage Daydream, arguing that dozens of existing films and books have already covered that ground. This is chiefly a film that foregrounds Bowie as high-voltage theatrical performer and living artwork. Like Todd Haynes’ recent Velvet Underground documentary, it also pays passing homage to the rich cultural source material that inspired Bowie, from German Expressionism to Japanese kabuki theatre, from Kerouac to Coltrane to Kubrick.
Morgen calls Moonage Daydream an “experiental nonfiction film”. It certainly plays like a full-spectrum sensory feast, with music, speech and visuals all thickly layered into a maximalist mosaic that sometimes feels deliciously rich, at other times cluttered and overwhelming. Drenching classic Bowie songs in psychedelic Pop Art graphics, panoramic sci-fi vistas, animated snippets and random quickfire newsreel footage does not necessarily enhance the music or its creator.
Grasping for a loose narrative thread in all this kaleidoscopic chaos, Morgen uses Bowie’s more high-minded philosophical ruminations as a guide, peppering the film with quotes about Nietzsche and Buddha, transience and transcendence. The singer certainly had a rare intellectual curiosity, but he also spoke a lot of pretentious nonsense in interviews, which Morgen treats as precious pearls of wisdom. In his Cannes press material, the director seems to view Bowie as a kind of spiritual mentor, describing the film as “highly personal” and a “letter to my children”. Inevitably, the authorial voice running through Moonage Daydream often feels too much like Morgen and too little like Bowie.
In fairness, the prime target audience for Moonage Daydream is probably not fastidious Bowie geeks (like me) who will already be very familiar with most of the source material. Indeed, I was in the audience for at at least one of the concerts featured here. Admittedly there is some snobbish uber-fan appeal in forensically breaking down which promo videos Morgen has pillaged for narrative-style shots, which Philip Glass piece he has used to replace the original audio track, which vintage BBC interviews he has cannibalised for quotes, and so on. But these rarefied nerdgasms are small pleasures.
The most uncritical audience for Moonage Daydream will likely be casual fans or recent coverts, who may not have previously been aware of some key threads in Bowie’s hinterland: his schizophrenic half-brother Terry Burns, for example, who turned the future pop legend onto modern jazz and cult literature. Or his own dabbling in visual art, as represented here by a colourful montage of pretty decent neo-Expressionist paintings. Even more obsessive fans will find a few rare treasures. The professionally shot footage of Bowie’s 1978 Isolar II tour, at the peak of his avant-rock “Berlin period”, is a ravishing delight but frustratingly brief.
Above all else, Moonage Daydream features some gloriously vivid performances of classic Bowie numbers: Space Oddity, All The Young Dudes, Life on Mars, Gene Genie, Oh You Pretty Things, Cracked Actor, Heroes, Absolute Beginners, Let’s Dance, Hello Spaceboy, Blackstar and more. As an assault on the senses with lofty spiritual intentions, it feels bombastic and bloated. But as a high-gloss video jukebox of some of the greatest pop music ever written, this is a sense-swamping banquet of Bowie-ness, a crash course for the ravers.
Director, screenwriter, editor: Brett Morgan
Producers: Brett Morgen, Bill Gerber, Debra Eisenstadt
Music: David Bowie
Music producer: Tony Visconti
Animation and graphics: Stefan Nadelman
Production companies: Universal Pictures (US), BMG (US), Live Nation (US), Public Road Productions (US)
World sales: Submarine, WME
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In English
140 minutes
