September 23, 2022

I was in the mood to do something this afternoon that had nothing to do with my job, my writing, or my to-do list, aka something fun, so I went to see the new documentary on David Bowie, Moonage Daydream.  I've never been a yuge Bowie fan, but I like several of his songs, and I've always liked the Ziggy Stardust album; and since the trailer featured lots of footage from the Ziggy period, and since the movie's title was taken from a song on that LP, I figured it would be a good bet, and so I didn't bother reading any reviews beforehand, which is something I never do.  In a way, I'm glad I didn't, because if I'd come across any that expressed the reservations about the film that I walked away with, I probably wouldn't have gone to see it.  And I'm not sorry that I saw it, as I thought it was an interesting film.  It was certainly more interesting than the biopic of Bowie's younger contemporaries Freddie Mercury and Queen that I saw when it came out a few years back.  But I don't think it was better.  Moonage Daydream is an often phantasmagoric mashup of concert and interview footage, and audio snippets of Bowie talking about art, life, fame, his past, etc., played over music-video style collages of images, home movies of him traveling, etc.  Its structure is loosely chronological, though with lots of jumping ahead and back.  These compositional features nicely complement, and in a sense mirror, the largely improvisational nature of Bowie's various artistic phases that emerges over the course of the film.  At the same time, though, the foregrounding of these features, and their repetitiveness, betray an emptiness at the film's core.  Moonage Daydream does not meaningfully interrogate Bowie's various stances and pronouncements.  There are no independent voices except those of his different interviewers, and these always brief encounters are with few if any exceptions edited so as to give Bowie the last word.  Ultimately, the film feels like a clever but overlong fan tribute.  Bowie himself, at least as presented here, seems to have (mostly) rejected the idea that any of us are knowable in any meaningful way, so I can imagine this being a documentary he would have liked.  However, I'm not sure that it's the documentary he, or any of us who appreciate his music and art, deserve.