‘Moonage Daydream’ Review: Brett Morgen Beams You To Planet David Bowie In A Musical Space Extravaganza [Cannes]

The great majority of us could only aspire, before “Moonage Daydream,” to step into the mind of David Bowie — the persona, the artist, the entity not yet proven terrestrial. Eclectic, unashamedly maximalist, and variously philosophical: all true of both the man himself and Brett Morgen’s feature-length docu-odyssey, which borrows its title from the 1976 hit, and just debuted as part of Cannes’ Midnight slate. Fifty years of Bowie’s career are traversed here, from the moment he collided with the earth and found a fervorous, tears-in-their-eyes-and-hands-in-the-air fanbase, right through to his return to the cosmos in the early-2010s. The scope shrinks in the final third, as Morgen seemingly retreats into a more comfortable linear chronology — the last twenty years of his life blast past as quickly as his first — but whew, this is one helluva technicolor starship.

Starship isn’t just lofty rhetoric. It’ll come at no surprise that the enigma who wrote and recorded “Space Odyssey,” “Starman” and “Life on Mars” is introduced, first and foremost, as a being from another planet, watching over Earth from the Moon. We beam down, next, to one of Ziggy Stardust’s — as Bowie was known in the early days — first concerts in the ‘70s, cut against snips and reels from a smorgasbord of silent movies. Think “Nosferatu” and “Metropolis,” so as to impart Bowie’s sci-fi nature, his shape-shifting sensibilities, his fuck-the-heteros androgyny. It generally courses forward from here but he speaks, in an early voice-over, about the amorphous nature of time; reflecting Bowie’s zig-zag temporal philosophy, Morgen cuts in images of the artist from decades closer to the present. It’s a thrilling way to present a man who defied the shackles of time, be it for the genderfuck, his forward-thinking lyricism, or his expressed bisexuality.

Any Bowie doc authorized by his estate, of course, with access to his extensive discography — along with rarefied deep cuts that’ve seldom met the light of day, and numerous hours of archived concert recordings — boasts a head start apropos of the artist’s musical verve. There seldom exists a person who could sit through a such a rapturous soundscape as in “Moonage Daydream,” a sonic collage of full tracks, motifs, ethereal acapella and catchy instrumentals, without excitedly pumping a fist or two; you don’t need a red thunderbolt splashed across your face to be absorbed by the vibe. Morgen, music producer Tony Visconti and music editor John Warhust have done wonders here, curating a manifold playlist of the familiar and the novel, chopping up well-loved tracks to make the known distinct.

This is a concert movie by way of memoir flick, archival footage of Bowie’s shows cut against appearances in TV interviews, swishing about in the streets amid gawping passers by, zipping from airports to venues in a baby-blue suit with golden sunglasses like a bonafide rockstar. Morgen’s images are often enriched with vivid color, flashing with deep sapphire and rich scarlet; candid Polaroids are juxtaposed against Bowie’s rapturous fans, fingers inching towards their messiah with all of their might. If anyone happened to forget about Bowiemania in the last twenty years of his life, as the chameleon shed his skin to become a flesh-and-bones fellow, allow Morgen to remind you: it wasn’t just The Beatles. 

This isn’t to say the whole thing is a two-hour-and-twenty-minute puff piece. Your mileage will vary depending on how much time you have for the subject waxing eloquent on Nietzche and the nature of art, or his general air of nihilism. Morgen pointedly includes a clip wherein Bowie asserts that he himself, as with many of his rockstar peers from the aforementioned Liverpudlian lads to Mick Jagger, are inventions of the feverous public hivemind. It’s not just that their stardom is contrived: Bowie doesn’t exist, or so he argues, but a product of collective perception. The tension between the star and the self is hardly novel ground to cover, but to hear it from the horse’s mouth in such an assertive manner, if one can overlook the sliver of obnoxiousness, makes for fascinating material.

Elating musical extravaganza aside, this feels like the fundamental point of “Moonage Daydream”: that this alien being, this creature of another dimension, this singular product of the multiverse, was actually none of those things but a fallible man. But hey, no one needs to be more than human. Art is not by its very nature Promethean, but the product of human beings determined to be heard — and sometimes, the best of times, with something to say. [B+]