REVIEW: Brett Morgen’s David Bowie documentary “Moonage Daydream” plunges into the mind of the rock star and comes away with something that, at its best, is a gift of sound and vision, writes AP Film Writer Jake Coyle.
” plunges into the mind of the rock star — it puts a ray gun to Bowie’s head — and comes away with something that, at its best, is a gift of sound and vision.It goes without saying that Bowie, like his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust, always seemed to have beamed down from another planet: an elegant extraterrestrial with a spacey schtick that was genuinely convincing.
After Morgen has toured us through much of Bowie’s ravenous spiritual journey, it’s illuminating when Bowie — in a dead serious tone not heard anywhere else in the film, as if just saying it out loud irks him — explains his modus operandi not grandly but quotidianly: “I hate to waste days.
Morgen’s approach is about as far away as you can get from a talking-head documentary. With the passionate fury of someone drunk on music at 2 a.m., Morgen throws that archival stuff — plus countless split-second snippets from all kind of other sources — into a kaleidoscopic collider to craft a visceral, impressionistic portrait of Bowie.
It’s an approach that inevitably sacrifices context. I was less enamored with Morgen’s similarly styled 2015 documentary, “Cobain: Montage of Heck,” partly because I felt, in sifting through every doodle and diary entry of Kurt Cobain’s, that the film 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.
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