Moonage Daydream poster
Mick Jagger once complained that if David Bowie liked your shoes, he’d turn up next week wearing an identical pair. What Jagger didn’t say is that Bowie would match them differently, lace them in different colors, reinvent the look. Endlessly curious about the world around him, Bowie’s eyes were always wide open and looking for material he could mold into new shapes.
Director Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is an exploration of Bowie’s creativity and imagination. It might frustrate fans looking for a concert movie; although it incorporates concert footage, including a thick slice of a Ziggy Stardust show, the live segments are particles of a larger whole. It definitely will frustrate fans of standard-issue rock biographies. Bowie wasn’t standard issue, and Morgen, emulating the cut-up method of lyric writing Bowie borrowed from William Burroughs, juxtaposes a carnival of (mostly) meaningful images with Bowie footage, jumping crisscross through time while chronicling his busy life.
Bowie’s voice from various interviews and thoughtful conversations is the through-line of Moonage Daydream, providing the documentary with an ongoing commentary in his own words.
Bowie acted in several films (The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hunger and Just a Gigolo are glimpsed along the way) and close-ups from the Ziggy Stardust concert reveal his expressive face as well as the wider physical gestures he learned as a mime. In one interview, recorded around the time of Let’s Dance (1983), he reveals that he was always acting—the real, shy David Bowie was hidden behind the roles he played. But maybe the real Bowie he revealed at that time was also a role?
Clearly, Bowie had a horror of standing still and getting stuck. Unlike many of his generational peers whose creativity waned into nostalgia, Bowie was rock’s Picasso with a career easily divided into distinct periods. For many years, each new album was a step into the unknown.
“I always seem to collect personalities and ideas,” he says at one point. At another, he adds, “My strivings have a strong spiritual basis,” a search for meaning outside himself. As puts it, he was a Buddhist on Tuesday and a Nietzschean on Friday. From Buddha, he absorbed the idea of life’s impermanence. From Nietzsche …?
“I put myself into predicaments to see how I’ll cope,” Bowie says, citing his move in the mid-‘70s to Los Angeles, a city he “detested.” They were in some ways his low years. A television interview from the period reveals a coked-out jittery rock star; in concert footage he’s animatronic and emotionally ugly.
That carnival of images gathered by Morgen: Metropolis (repeatedly), The Seventh Seal, Georges Méliès and cheap ‘50s sci-fi, Lou Reed, Aleister Crowley and Oscar Wilde, John Coltrane … a panoply of inspiration that moved Bowie’s imagination at one time or another. Of his personal life, we learn of emotionally distant parents, a brilliant older half-brother institutionalized for schizophrenia—and the love of his life, Iman. The rest is moon dust.
