A David Bowie doc like no other: Moonage Daydream reviewed

Moonage Daydream is a music documentary like no other, which is fitting as the subject is David Bowie. If it’s David Bowie, make it special or just don’t bother. And this is special. It’s an immersive, trippy, hurtling, throbbing two hours and 15 minutes. If Disneyland did a Bowie ride, this would be it. Yet it isn’t shallow. There are some real insights. Bowie was cool and sexy and beautiful, but also somehow aloof and otherworldly, an enigma, never everyday. I can imagine Paul McCartney at home and I can imagine Mick Jagger at home. But I have never been able to imagine David Bowie at home, turning to Iman and saying: ‘What shall we do for dinner? Fish again?’ This, though, brings us as close to knowing him as an actual person as we are ever going to get.

The film has been made by the writer, director and editor Brett Morgan, who has previously made documentaries about Kurt Cobain, the Rolling Stones and also one about the legendary film producer Robert Evans. Morgan is the first to work in co-operation with the Bowie estate, which gave him full access to the archives. The challenge here wasn’t acquiring material – there were five million ‘assets’ to choose from, apparently – but the shaping of it. The film is cradle-to-grave yet not in the accepted sense. There are no talking heads, no graphics showing Bowie’s latest record moving up the Billboard charts, not a single tour date flying off a calendar. Set to his music (lushly remixed by his long-time producer and friend Tony Visconti), Bowie narrates this himself (taken from old interviews). It’s a collage of concert footage, crying fans, being bundled into the back of cars and all that, but also it’s silent movies, the weather, psychedelic light shows. It reflects his energy. It is overwhelmingly frantic but so was Bowie’s curiosity – ‘I was Buddhist on Tuesday but by Friday I was into Nietzsche’ – and it’s beset by truth bombs: ‘Artists are false prophets. People believe in them more than they matter.’ Actually, I don’t know if that’s a truth bomb or not. But Bowie can make anything sound like one.

The film is chronological and you can tell where you are in time by how old Bowie looks, what his hair is doing, the clothes he is wearing. There’s Ziggy, Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, and all that shape-shifting. Some clips are familiar, such as the ones from Cracked Actor, Alan Yentob’s documentary on Bowie from 1975. (I watched it again recently. For an Alan Yentob documentary there is surprisingly little Alan Yentob in it.) We see Bowie wearing women’s shoes and being interviewed by a sniggering Russell Harty. ‘Are those bisexual shoes?’ he is asked ‘They’re shoe shoes, silly,’ is the reply. There are many arresting images. In one he is caught from the back, watching a television somewhere, entirely on his own, like a scene from The Man Who Fell to Earth.

He lived in the places he least wanted to live (LA, Berlin) because he needed that abrasion. His quest had always been to ‘explore the areas of the mind where there are grains of truth that we don’t have the words for.’ There are telling juxtapositions. ‘I’ve reached a vacuum,’ he says, over footage of him dancing with Tina Turner in a Pepsi ad. He was a distant person, always withdrawing, until he met Iman. He didn’t want to leave her to go on tour, saying: ‘How many precious moments am I willing to give away at 45?’ He is fascinating on ageing, and how, once you’re comfortable in your own skin, creativity stalls, as you’re not searching for yourself any more…and now I’ve slipped into merely repeating what is in the film. It’s probably better if you just go see it for yourself.