Film Review: Moonage Daydream a dazzling kaleidoscope of music, fashion and philosophy

It incorporates interviews and live performances along with Bowie’s personal ruminations on the world

From Oscar-nominated filmmaker Brett Morgen, director of Cobain: Montage of Heck, and featuring never-before-seen concert footage, Moonage Daydream is an immersive cinematic experience.

Moonage Daydream

★★★★☆

It’s something of a convention when it comes to David Bowie biopics, of which Moonage Daydream (15A) is the latest, to proceed according to a strict chronological narrative, in which David Jones becomes Ziggy Stardust and then Aladdin Sane and afterwards metamorphoses into the Thin White Duke, etc. Happily, Brett Morgan’s documentary is a less literal affair than most.

From an early stage in his career, runs the thesis, Bowie was engaged in ‘creating the 21st century in the 1970s’. That’s a grandiose claim, but it allows the filmmaker to juxtapose aspects of Bowie’s personality in ways that allow us to see beyond the established mythology.

Employing plenty of previously unseen (or very rare) footage, which incorporates interviews and live performances along with Bowie’s personal ruminations on the world, Moonage Daydream blends the public and the private as Morgan splices together Bowie’s musical odyssey and his more intimate, spiritual journey. 

The result is a dazzling and occasionally bewildering kaleidoscope of music, fashion and philosophy as the restlessly protean Bowie pursues endless reinvention, all of which is given a refreshing honesty by Bowie’s self-deprecating awareness of his own limitations (“I was a Buddhist on Tuesday,” he notes by way of acknowledging his lack of philosophical rigor, “and I was into Nietzsche by Friday”.)

Moonage Daydream not only illuminates the enigmatic legacy of David Bowie but also serves as a guide to living a fulfilling and meaningful life in the 21st Century. 

Devoted fans might lament the fact that the music from the latter stages of Bowie’s career, and particularly that of Blackstar, his final album, doesn’t receive as much attention as, say, his incarnation as Ziggy Stardust, which has at this stage been covered to the point of monotony.

Overall, though, Moonage Daydream is a satisfying film that does full justice to Bowie’s chameleon-like approach to artistic creativity, and a wonderful primer for anyone out there who is still wondering why David Bowie matters.

(IMAX release; general release from September 23).