Review: MOONAGE DAYDREAM

While this film follows a timeline of its subject's career it is so vaguely that it cannot bear the name documentary with any faith. It is, on the contrary, an immersion. From the ominous opening moments where the name Bowie is spelled out similarly to the title in Alien where each letter appears without obvious order until its complete. In Alien this cleverly suggests an unearthly alphabet but in this film it foreshadows the form we are about to sit through: a bit from the end, some middle, there's the O, more middle etc. And then we plunge into deafening concert footage and liquid colour as stage lighting seems to soak into everything it touches and the sound of the magnetic voice at its centre holds the chaos in. We see him preparing for his early '70s video for Life on Mars, impossibly whitefaced with candy toned makeup, and in equally gaudy costume, fending off the smarmy questions of Russell Harty until the latter seems to swallow every question he utters. A couple of quotes encapsulate the way Bowie might have looked back on his ridiculed 1980s by showing him ecstatic at the stadium sized popularity and then, jaded, preferring the creative freedom of the margins. This is David Bowie in high career from the end of the '60s to the end of his life, singing, noodling, opining, stumbling through cokey interviews here, effortlessly intimidating with quiet confidence there, very often very funny, and pretty much always dazzling.

Brett Morgen who directed, compiled and edited the footage as well as inserting some of his own imagery, also mixed and shaped the music track which, apart from the concert footage, is an epic of reimagined familiarity. Like the more conventional Finding Fame documentary from 2019, Morgen worked from recording stems so he could lay down a groove from Young Americans and feed some Low on top or some plaintive isolated vocals from Cygnet Committee between the jags and wires of Heroes. Add a mass of costuming over decades, eye popping stage setups, more than a few extended live takes that might make you well up, with garnishes of antique cinema and vintage media and you have this, an experience rather than a documentary, an experience more than a film.

To be able to do this convincingly you do need a Bowie or someone whose protean faces on parade frequently brought him to the question of who he really was and how close that might be in relation to the personae he pushed on to the stage. Taken that way, this is an immersion into intoxicating fame. We don't need to see fans distraught at missing out on a sight of Ziggy or ogling upward in Speilbergian wonder. This glancing blow of what it might be like to be so beloved but also where you might have left yourself before the first word you uttered into the microphone. This is what saves this film from hagiography, while it does leave some elements out it also deals plainly by describing itself as a celebration: we really aren't seeing a saint of modern showbiz but we are seeing someone who sought to create as much as he could before his light went out. Does that mean he really did that every day? Everyone has hangovers. It might well mean that he damn near got close. If you fall a little short of Bowie fandom this film will be an assault. If you're in, you won't know where the time went.