MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY FILM INQUIRER

Moonage Daydream, the latest project from American filmmaker Brett Morgen (Jane, Cobain: Montage of Heck), is a cacophonous triumph of music and colour, just as ethereal and transitory as the late artist it reveres: David Bowie is back on the big screen.

This film is not your typical ‘cradle to grave’ documentary, with Morgen instead opting to cast Bowie as a collage of stardom and iconography, a perpetual performer stitched together through vast international video and film archives. In effect, Moonage Daydream is more experiential than it is narratively linear. It attempts to re-create Bowie through live performance footage cleverly edited together to conjure a sort of fever dream trance over the audience. If you desire to see a Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocketman style bio-pic but for David Bowie, my apologies, but this is thankfully not that. Instead, Morgen entrusts the viewer to settle into the sensations of Bowie rather than the narrative. In this way, Moonage Daydream is not so much biographical as it is just ‘graphical’, an audio-visual shrine to Bowie’s diverse artistry without an explicit, dramatised investigation into who the person behind the art was. It’s a considered choice, made by Morgen throughout the writing process of the film, and the result is an unrelenting exhibition of Bowie’s career. Yet, naturally there is a narrative, philosophy, and history in Moonage Daydream, because those exist in not only Bowie’s art, but also in how Morgen carefully chooses to construct his work.

One example of this is the film’s unimpeded runtime at 2 hours and 20 minutes. Some may say this is indulgently long, and I do agree, but this indulgence is earned and certainly serves the film instead of subtracting from it. Morgen leaves no tape on the cutting room floor, and despite its length and lack of clear linearity, Moonage Daydream is at its best when given the time and space to breathe. In this space, Morgen doesn’t just focus on Bowie either, but also the context of Bowie’s environment. I lost count of how many famous cinematic shots there are in Moonage Daydream, but there was definitely some Nosferatu and 2001: A Space Odyssey thrown in there amongst countless other renowned films. The random implementation of cinema may seem slightly out of line when you’re reading about it on the page, but in the experiential and sensational tonality of Moonage Daydream, this collage of influence and iconography is seamless. It does of course help cover up seams though when your film-subject is none other than one of the most magnetic and diverse artistic icons in recent Western history.

Such is the force of stardom, Bowie lives on here to as great effect as ever, an artist whose work was, and still is, in constant dialogue with time, solitude and death. And it is on these three topics that Moonage Daydream really transcends through its relationship between Bowie as the artist and Morgen as the exhibitor. Following the IMAX MIFF screening I attended of Moonage Daydream, Morgen held a Q and A about the film, where he disclosed that right when he was about to make the film he had “a massive heart attack, I flatlined and was in a coma for a week. When I came out of that I started to go through all the Bowie material and that is the film you just saw, my experience coming back to life, very much a resurrection”. In much of the found footage in Moonage Daydream, we often see Bowie express his appreciation of life, it being the one thing he ‘worships’. Bowie tells us to live each day and moment as if it were our last, life is a gift that nobody appreciates truly. At first glance, these are eye-rollingly sentimental words from a megastar privileged enough to be able to preach them. And yet, Moonage Daydream deftly guides you through Bowie’s glimpsed philosophies, where the sincerity in his words far outshine any potential scepticism to be held. To hear of Morgen’s own existential and near-death experience in the making of this truly adds another layer of depth.

You will not get a complete picture of either Bowie or Morgen from this film, but you will get an ineffable earnestness which adds a weight to the experience. And that’s the thing about any iconic artist or person, you idealise them for what you see, and in turn, they heighten in you the commonality that attracts you both. Bowie seemed to have a way to reach into that void and find that commonality for a lot of people, and in Moonage Daydream, Morgen finds a way to reach into the void that is Bowie and find what it is that is so sensational and pervasive. I believe that there is much more to Moonage Daydream than meets the eye; it is not simply a dazzling David Bowie highlights reel with world-class sound mixing.

In the world of Bowie, Moonage Daydream should remain a great exhibitory artifact of what it means to understand him through experience. And in the world of cinema, this is a commendable addition.

While Moonage Daydream is no longer screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival (running online through MIFF Play until the 28th), a wide theatrical release will blast into cinemas beginning September 15th. Interested in writing a review of anything? Just send us an email.