Moonage Daydream is one of the best tributes to artist and man David Bowie. A sincere and personal tribute from a fan who has decided to use their skills and their craft to create something original and new. The director Brett Morgen, drawing on the official archives, has created a visual and sound pastiche of enormous charm and intensity. The work broadcast in cinemas all over the world (calling it a ‘documentary’ would be imprecise and misleading), however, potentially has some defects which, at least on first viewing, take second place.
The cinematic story seems to be inspired by the lyrical compositions of Bowie himself: a real cut-up not only of images, films, interviews, TV shows, live performances, films, video clips, short films … all very fragmented, cut, extrapolated, decontextualized. Also a musical nebula of many pieces by him (some very famous, others less obvious) which for the occasion have been cleaned up and mixed from scratch, or superimposed, modified, mixed and sometimes merged with each other.
The choice of the director seems to be a winning one but above all it is the only one that can be used to try to describe and narrate such a rich and complex universe. Everything is inserted in a narrative arc which, while proceeding through numerous flashbacks and flashforwards, outlines the main artistic stages of ours: Ziggy and the outrageous glam period, the grotesque Diamond Dogsthe luciferine Los Angeles and the abyss of hard drugs, the cold and experimental Berlin parenthesis, up to Scary Monsters. So the pop hangover of Let’s Dance and the rebirth during the 90s, to then arrive at the discographic return after the media silence.
A circle that musically opens and closes with Hallo Spaceboy (in the incipit the remix version with the Pet Shop Boys, in the conclusion the industrial one coming from 1.Outside). The choices may sometimes seem arbitrary but they can only be underlying a deliberately not all-encompassing intention. Of course the possibilities for further propositions were many (personally we would have liked to see more from Station to Station, Scary Monsters or Heathen) but the quality level is still high and spectacular, with few drops and several apexes. If the third apocryphal musical episode dedicated to Major Tom is the only one to have the honor of being proposed in full twice, other pieces written in the second part of his career appear generously but only in very short excerpts, mainly with the function of sound connection. .
On the other hand, many songs from the 70s are the master (the complete soundtrack is already available in streaming and will be published on physical support next November). Meanwhile, there is time and attention to devote to Bowie as an actor, painter and thinker. Few words were spent towards collaborators, but those dedicated to are fundamental Brian Eno and humanly intense those in favor of stepbrother Terry and second wife Iman (Angie has to settle for some – however beautiful – snapshots of Terry O’Neill). The intentions that led him from a talented artist – but basically a niche – to a rock star idolized by the masses are very well outlined.
The segment extracted from Ziggy’s performance at the Hammersmith Odeon (originally directed by DA Pennbaker in 1973) is a real feast for the eyes and ears, embellished by the unprecedented (at least officially) performance of the guitarist Jeff Beck in reinforcement to the Spiders on the notes of Jean Geanie / Love Me Do. On the other hand, the choice to extrapolate some fragments from the documentary is almost obvious, but necessary Cracked Actor by Alan Yentob. There are, however, two visual documents to which Morgen – a little slyly – uses constantly. The first is the essential The Man Who Fell To Earth by Nicolas Roeg: gem of Bow’s filmography whose protagonist was a perfect alter-ego, with whom he continued to identify himself for years not only on the covers of his records, but also in the unconscious of his fans. The second is something that instead was more or less ended up in oblivion, or superficially set aside on the dusty shelves of the VHS (but of course already available on Youtube for some time), or Ricochet.
The most interesting parts of the 1984 documentary, an audiovisual appendix created following the success of Let’s Dance, acts as a real visual and meta-narrative frame. It is precisely on that film set in the megacities of Hong Kong and Bangkok that the impressive assemblage of the voice of David Robert Jones is often grafted, coming from very different interviews throughout his long career. 2 hours and 18 minutes in which the narrator travels an incredible journey that plunges us into his interests, discography, art and thought. And again extrapolations from the EPK of Realityhosted in the television lounges, the low-definition images of rare and precious performances.
Those who were looking especially for unpublished material may initially be disappointed, yet Morgen plays very well what little he was probably granted (it is a bet that someone at the source has forced him to sip as much as possible). One of the first fragments that, for example, literally nailed us to the armchair is a gestural performance in time of him only hinted at in the video clip of The Hearth’s Filthy Lesson. Curiously, it is the only episode not superimposed on music produced by Bowie. Here in fact the sound accompaniment is The Lightan original composition by Philip Glass (also present later in the minute with his splendid symphonic adaptation from “Heroes”) which emphasizes David’s intense and incredible gestures (moves from another world, one might say).
Other superb on-and-off scenes from 1990s video clips (Miracle Goodnight, Jump They Say, Hunger ’90) recur from time to time as highly evocative and particularly suggestive material. However, it is worth mentioning a taste of the unprecedented performance from the concert at Earl’s Court in London, filmed by David Hemmings during the 1978 Isolar Tour II. Perhaps a real good omen for a future (and coveted) release: one of the many examples where the cleanliness of the images is at the height of the impeccable sound.
Of course, all enhanced and magnified for those who have had the opportunity to use Moonage Daydream in the IMAX room. The presence of some extracts rather rare for the international public but not for the Italian one is interesting, for example excerpts of interviews carried out by Red Ronnie or segments of the Odeon program, shot in Rome in 1977 by Rai2. Perhaps the real surprise, however, are the short segments of the homemade movies that Bowie directed around 1974, real storyboards on video for the aborted project of 1984.
The contribution of various editors guarantees a great diversification (and a constantly fragmented rendering) of the images, always in a compelling and almost always convincing way. A continuous enrichment with clips from other filmic works: feature films, music videos, TV broadcasts, television series, documentaries, short films … inspirations or simple intrinsically significant and afferent audiovisual material. It passes by Metropolis by Fritz Lang a A Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel, Clockwork Orange And 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, but also Nosferatu by Friedrich Murnau, Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger and much, much more. A true stream of consciousness on video.
Moonage Daydream turns out to be a remarkable experience within David Bowie’s kaleidoscopic career, ideal for those who know him superficially and want to deepen, unmissable for those who appreciate him thoroughly and can’t get enough. Those who objected to the choices made by the director may not have taken into account the vastness of the material or the cut, addressed to the widest possible audience. However, if we want to make a “European” critique unfamiliar with stellar spectacularity and its petty philosophy, we would like to place it on the peak of the roller coaster of images (whirling, often accompanied by gunshots, fireworks, thuds, flashes, explosions). The condensation of the entire media library of the 20th century is certainly a functional and instrumental glue to the show but there is a doubt that sometimes it justifies its depth as a pretext. Bowie becomes a medium of his own art in this lunar daydream, a short-circuit towards an artist who had been an avid reader and only partially consumer, one who was “afraid of americans” and with good reasons that are also the our.
If on the one hand a more firm and selective pulse on the narrative would have brought order to the flows of images and words by introducing gaps of meaning, mystery and vertigo based on voids (certainly not on fullness) it is also true that on the other hand the approach to be patchwork, the chaotic and rhapsodic movement like a drunken diviner on the Bowiano corpus, wants to communicate an unexplored excess with the toolbox of cinema, TV, any screen in general. It looks like a kaleidoscope that explodes from within and recomposes itself and then explodes again, again and again. And the cosmic darkness stands by, with its black star mystery.
The experience ends in the reverberation of the mantra of Memory of a free festival part 2 while in the background the locomotive of Station to Stationon the big screen instead the roar of applause during the thrill of live concerts and some frames from Blackstar: the corpse of astronaut Tom on a distant planet, the sabbath dance of some women who in a circle perform some mysterious rite with the jeweled skull in the center … and in the meantime Bowie’s funereal lucubrations on death, rebirth, redemption and spirituality continue.
Far too much for a single viewing. During the credits two untouchable evergreens are proposed and therefore left unchanged, Starman And Changes. Finally, a post-credit audio bonus in which Bowie addresses the audience with an absolutely comical speech, just to remember how he was not only a brilliant artist, but also a great joker.