A Reel Review: MOONAGE DAYDREAM

As the first documentary to be officially authorized by the estate of the late great David Bowie, the pressure was on director Brett Morgen to get things right. After all, music docs have a tendency to veer into hero worship, with either narration or old buddies recounting war stories. In MOONAGE DAYDREAM, Bowie gets to speak for himself. 

A trippy documentary that uses previously unreleased footage from Bowie’s personal archives, MOONAGE DAYDREAM is an untraditional experience. Lacking any sort of structure, shape, or standard documentary tropes of third-party interviews or narration, the film values art over information; using images, music, and clever editing that doesn’t want to analyze Bowie as much as it wants to shine a light on him. Assembled with archival interviews of Bowie, his own home videos, and live concert footage, DAYDREAM unfolds just like a dream…without any sort of shape and just a loose revisit of his life starting with the Ziggy Stardust era. 

The experience of DAYDREAM, and it is certainly meant to be an experience more than a learning session, can be frustrating to those looking for, or used to the traditional film narrative. Director Brett Morgan goes all over the map in filling the run time of 140 minutes; using animation and old stock B-movies in seemingly random places. Morgen repeats shots here and there, and it can make for a bewildering viewing. The highlights of the film are the in-concert performances which truly do illuminate the man, and the archival interviews which have been lost in time and are very revealing. 

For the most part MOONAGE DAYDREAM works. Bowie was never an artist who could be considered traditional or in any sort of box, so a film about his life should rightly be the same. Despite the shaplessness of the film, Morgen does discover a common thread; that Bowie was a man who was in constant need of expressing himself. Finding that thread was a herculean task in the assumed thousands of hours of footage Morgen had to have gone through. The film also has a focus on Bowie’s changing as he gets older, but sadly ends before we get into his later years. 

Long-time fans of Bowie will eat this film up, and will probably pick up on references or Easter Eggs that casual listeners would miss in all of the random visuals. It is aptly titled, as it unfolds like a dream; not making sense but still getting the message across. This is a film for Bowie lovers only, and that limitation keeps it from hitting star-status. 

BOTTOM LINE: Rent it