Review: ‘Moonage Daydream’ brings Bowie again to Earth

By Associated Press

Brett Morgen’s David Bowie documentary “Moonage Daydream ” plunges into the thoughts of the rock star — it places a ray gun to Bowie’s head — and comes away with one thing that, at its greatest, is a present of sound and imaginative and prescient.

It goes with out saying that Bowie, like his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust, all the time appeared to have beamed down from one other planet: a chic extraterrestrial with a spacey schtick that was genuinely convincing. “Moonage Daydream,” which opens Friday on IMAX screens, does a lot to exalt that Bowie delusion, marveling at this remarkably good-looking creature and his sly actions, his gender-bending on-stage contortions, his otherworldly inventive pursuit. “He’s magic,” says one younger fan exterior a live performance.

But what I most preferred about Morgen’s movie is how, in sticking as carefully to Bowie’s personal phrases, ideas and psychology, it reveals not an alien, in any respect, however reasonably a person — an precise and superb Earthling — so deeply related and enraptured with the world and all its prospects that he can’t cease himself from sampling all of it, and filtering it via his work.

After Morgen has toured us via a lot of Bowie’s ravenous non secular journey, it’s illuminating when Bowie — in a useless severe tone not heard wherever else within the movie, as if simply saying it out loud irks him — explains his modus operandi not grandly however quotidianly: “I hate to waste days.” Since seeing “Moonage Daydream,” I’ve been sometimes transported again to its wealthy collage of images and rumination, however I’ve largely been terrified at what it might need as soon as meant to face in the way in which of Bowie and a well-used day.

“I’m a collector,” Bowie says at one other time within the movie, explaining his wide-ranging sources of inspiration. The identical could also be true for Morgen, the primary filmmaker for whom the Bowie property has opened all its archives of journals, images, recordings and unseen live performance footage. This offers “Moonage Daydream” a bracingly contemporary and intimate perspective on a much-documented musician.

Morgen’s strategy is about as distant as you may get from a talking-head documentary. With the passionate fury of somebody drunk on music at 2 a.m., Morgen throws that archival stuff — plus numerous split-second snippets from all type of different sources — right into a kaleidoscopic collider to craft a visceral, impressionistic portrait of Bowie.

Few voices are heard within the movie that aren’t clips of Bowie musing. His narration is used much less to put out the chronology of his life (although “Moonage Daydream” is chronological) than it’s to supply a sustained meditation on his life, his artwork and the expertise of “treating myself as a bit of an experiment.”

It’s an strategy that inevitably sacrifices context. I used to be much less enamored with Morgen’s equally styled 2015 documentary, “Cobain: Montage of Heck,” partly as a result of I felt, in sifting via each doodle and diary entry of Kurt Cobain’s, that the movie took too worshipful of a stance. “Moonage Daydream,” too, suffers for a spell in its lack of any opposition to Bowie’s self-driven narrative. It’s properly into the movie that cracks start to emerge — what it means to dwell, as Bowie says, “like an empty vessel.” “Love can’t get quite in the way,” he says, with out regret, in a single particularly reflective TV interview.

But there are additionally different documentaries that may ably fill that function. The perspective Morgen appears to be after is Bowie’s, not anybody else’s, and “Moonage Daydream” succeeds spectacularly in burrowing into its topic’s creativeness. Being contained in the bubble of Bowie’s psychology is precisely the place the movie needs to be. And on this case, it’s not almost so confining. Bowie, a singer, painter, photographer, actor and world-traveler, has pursuits so wide-ranging that they open numerous different doorways. Plus, other than being concerning the coolest one who ever lived, Bowie is uncommonly considerate in analyzing himself. Sometimes Bowie, who refers to his public persona as “an intoxicating parallel to my perceived reality,” appears to be weighing himself like he would a chunk of artwork.

With an electrical eye, “Moonage Daydream” finds the slipstream of that actuality. I’d, although, have completed away with the final half hour, when the movie takes a extra dutiful strategy to following Bowie’s later chapters. The correct crescendo of “Moonage Daydream” comes a lot earlier, in a match of zeal for day-to-day existence and an impassioned one-word plea from Bowie: “Live!”

“Moonage Daydream,” a Neon launch, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for some sexual photos/nudity, temporary robust language and smoking. Running time: 140 minutes. Three and a half stars out of 4.

Brett Morgen’s David Bowie documentary “Moonage Daydream ” plunges into the thoughts of the rock star — it places a ray gun to Bowie’s head — and comes away with one thing that, at its greatest, is a present of sound and imaginative and prescient.

It goes with out saying that Bowie, like his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust, all the time appeared to have beamed down from one other planet: a chic extraterrestrial with a spacey schtick that was genuinely convincing. “Moonage Daydream,” which opens Friday on IMAX screens, does a lot to exalt that Bowie delusion, marveling at this remarkably good-looking creature and his sly actions, his gender-bending on-stage contortions, his otherworldly inventive pursuit. “He’s magic,” says one younger fan exterior a live performance.

But what I most preferred about Morgen’s movie is how, in sticking as carefully to Bowie’s personal phrases, ideas and psychology, it reveals not an alien, in any respect, however reasonably a person — an precise and superb Earthling — so deeply related and enraptured with the world and all its prospects that he can’t cease himself from sampling all of it, and filtering it via his work.

After Morgen has toured us via a lot of Bowie’s ravenous non secular journey, it’s illuminating when Bowie — in a useless severe tone not heard wherever else within the movie, as if simply saying it out loud irks him — explains his modus operandi not grandly however quotidianly: “I hate to waste days.” Since seeing “Moonage Daydream,” I’ve been sometimes transported again to its wealthy collage of images and rumination, however I’ve largely been terrified at what it might need as soon as meant to face in the way in which of Bowie and a well-used day.

“I’m a collector,” Bowie says at one other time within the movie, explaining his wide-ranging sources of inspiration. The identical could also be true for Morgen, the primary filmmaker for whom the Bowie property has opened all its archives of journals, images, recordings and unseen live performance footage. This offers “Moonage Daydream” a bracingly contemporary and intimate perspective on a much-documented musician.

Morgen’s strategy is about as distant as you may get from a talking-head documentary. With the passionate fury of somebody drunk on music at 2 a.m., Morgen throws that archival stuff — plus numerous split-second snippets from all type of different sources — right into a kaleidoscopic collider to craft a visceral, impressionistic portrait of Bowie.

Few voices are heard within the movie that aren’t clips of Bowie musing. His narration is used much less to put out the chronology of his life (although “Moonage Daydream” is chronological) than it’s to supply a sustained meditation on his life, his artwork and the expertise of “treating myself as a bit of an experiment.”

It’s an strategy that inevitably sacrifices context. I used to be much less enamored with Morgen’s equally styled 2015 documentary, “Cobain: Montage of Heck,” partly as a result of I felt, in sifting via each doodle and diary entry of Kurt Cobain’s, that the movie took too worshipful of a stance. “Moonage Daydream,” too, suffers for a spell in its lack of any opposition to Bowie’s self-driven narrative. It’s properly into the movie that cracks start to emerge — what it means to dwell, as Bowie says, “like an empty vessel.” “Love can’t get quite in the way,” he says, with out regret, in a single particularly reflective TV interview.

But there are additionally different documentaries that may ably fill that function. The perspective Morgen appears to be after is Bowie’s, not anybody else’s, and “Moonage Daydream” succeeds spectacularly in burrowing into its topic’s creativeness. Being contained in the bubble of Bowie’s psychology is precisely the place the movie needs to be. And on this case, it’s not almost so confining. Bowie, a singer, painter, photographer, actor and world-traveler, has pursuits so wide-ranging that they open numerous different doorways. Plus, other than being concerning the coolest one who ever lived, Bowie is uncommonly considerate in analyzing himself. Sometimes Bowie, who refers to his public persona as “an intoxicating parallel to my perceived reality,” appears to be weighing himself like he would a chunk of artwork.

With an electrical eye, “Moonage Daydream” finds the slipstream of that actuality. I’d, although, have completed away with the final half hour, when the movie takes a extra dutiful strategy to following Bowie’s later chapters. The correct crescendo of “Moonage Daydream” comes a lot earlier, in a match of zeal for day-to-day existence and an impassioned one-word plea from Bowie: “Live!”

“Moonage Daydream,” a Neon launch, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for some sexual photos/nudity, temporary robust language and smoking. Running time: 140 minutes. Three and a half stars out of 4.