Moonage Daydream Review: A Maximalist Tribute to David Bowie’s Life and Art

True, the title of writer-director Brett Morgen’s documentary about David Bowie, Moonage Daydream, refers to the song of the same name from Bowie’s classic 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. But it could also be said to describe the feeling that Morgen inspires with the impressionistic way that he renders the life and art of the glam-rock icon on screen. Even more so than in Cobain: Montage of Heck, his 2015 film about Kurt Cobain, Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.

The means by which Morgen accomplishes his goal are startling to behold. For the film, the David Bowie Estate gave Morgen access to a wealth of rare recordings, films, drawings, and journals, and he hasn’t shied away from showing off that access on screen. Moonage Daydream weaves in more familiar footage—interview segments and clips from his stage and film performances—with previously unseen concert performances, alternate takes of songs, and other such archival material. Bowie himself wraps all of it together with a voiceover narration that Morgen, who also edited the film, pieced together from audio interviews and personal recordings. Fans of the artist will certainly find much to savor here.

But not everything in Moonage Daydream is from Bowie’s own hand. Though Bowie’s music dominates the soundtrack (with his songs remixed for maximum heart-thumping arena-rock impact), the documentary also includes music inspired by the man’s art, including snippets from the Philip Glass symphonies based on Bowie’s Low and Heroes albums. Morgen also acknowledges Bowie’s cultural inspirations, with montages featuring clips from older films like Metropolis, Scorpio Rising, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others, as well as clips from Bowie’s film work, including The Hunger, Labyrinth, and The Prestige.

More significantly, though, Morgen features animation from Stefan Nadelman throughout Moonage Daydream that ranges from spacey science-fiction, with recurring images of a lunar eclipse and a girl traipsing on the moon, to Stan Brakhage-like abstraction. These animated bits infuse the documentary with a surreal, fantastical air, befitting an artist who often gave off a humanoid vibe even at his most soulful. Combined with Morgen’s jittery editing style, Moonage Daydream above all evokes a feeling of restlessness—wholly appropriate to an artist who not only describes himself as restless in the film, but embodied that voraciousness through an oeuvre that spanned a wide range of styles and a desire for near-constant reinvention, as exemplified through his series of ever-changing stage and screen personas.

Unabashedly visceral as it may be, Moonage Daydream doesn’t always escape the moony-eyed feeling of hero worship, sometimes at the cost of nuance. Chief among its omissions is mention of Bowie’s cocaine addiction during much of his (unhappy, according to the documentary) time living in Los Angeles during the 1970s, which peaked with a moment in 1976 when he was photographed waving to a crowd at Victoria Station in London in what appeared to be a Nazi salute. (It was a gaffe that came atop pro-fascist comments that he had been quoted as saying in other public appearances at the time.) Though he would later retract such statements, their exclusion from the film suggests a timidity about peering into the darker corners of Bowie’s history that robs us of a deeper, more complex, and well-rounded portrait.

Which isn’t to say that Moonage Daydream is merely a portrait of a god. There are still many disarmingly human moments throughout the film. For one, Morgen acknowledges the history of mental illness in his family that affected his beloved brother Terry, and how it may have influenced some of his art. He’s also honest about some of Bowie’s professional failings, most notably his admission that, after he scored a major mainstream success with his 1983 album Let’s Dance, he became comfortable with stardom and settled into a state of artistic stasis, at least compared to his still-astonishing creative run from late-’60s to the early ’80s.

The Bowie that emerges through his own words, images, and performances in Morgen’s film is of an artist who knew exactly who he was and stayed true to his all-encompassing vision of life. Morgen may go overboard in trying to awe us with Bowie’s artistry, but at this film’s best, he also doesn’t forget the distinctive individual behind the game-changing art.