Moonage Daydream (2022)

Brett Morgen has form with tackling musical icons on screen, his 2015 examination of the Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain in Cobain: Montage of Heck was released to rave reviews on its release seven years ago. Addressing David Bowie is a different proposition, an enigma who spent far more time on this earth than Cobain, whilst spawning numerous stage personalities alongside some twenty-six studio albums. Morgen wisely sidesteps the traditional biopic style documentary in favour of a creatively expansive and spiritually engaging psychedelic dreamscape that compliments Bowie’s music and musings quite extraordinarily. Moonage Daydream features much of Bowie’s back catalogue as you’d expect, but it’s bookended by two versions of “Hallo Spaceboy”, a song from the exceptional but often overlooked album ‘Outside’ (stylised as 1. Outside) from 1995. Influenced by David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks (1990-2017), the film of which (Fire Walk With Me [1992]) Bowie starred in before reprising his role as a voiceover in The Return in 2017, Outside tells its own story of a detective investigating the murder of a fourteen year old girl during its nineteen song duration. This is relevant to Moonage Daydream in the sense that the concept of Outside as a fluid art form is similar to the way in which Morgen approaches the film. He uses numerous sequences of never seen before footage and live performances to encapsulate a figure that was ever changing, both in his outwardly appearance and in his outlook on life. Bowie’s ruminations on life and existence are in plentiful supply, and he tried his hand at many different art forms including appearing on the big screen (most notably in Nicolas Roeg’s excellent The Man Who Fell To Earth [1976]) as well as painting, amongst others. Morgen bravely approaches Moonage Daydream with the same attitude, attempting to ingratiate Bowie’s own methods to his film, and this results in a stunning spectacle that completely consumes and overwhelms you, seemingly throwing you into Bowie’s own brain where the ideas come thick and fast, forming whilst Morgen drowns you in the genius of Bowie’s songwriting. Appropriately it’s only at the end of the film where we hear a few notes from Bowie’s staggeringly brilliant swan song “Blackstar”; a brief few seconds from the title tracks’ middle section offer a glimpse of Bowie’s mortality, something that, for the uninitiated might be the first hint that the films’ star is in fact no longer with us; despite it being a topic Bowie himself ponders stoically in interviews during the film. The best way to approach Moonage Daydream is to simply let it engulf you in the same way Bowie’s music does, and although this is no less of an incredible journey if you’re not familiar with the art, if you’re a Bowie fan, this is simply unmissable. 8.5/10