Review of Moonage Daydream (2022) by Calbear — 17 Sep 2022

What a wasted opportunity! There's so much archival footage of Bowie out there - concert and interview - but this feels like they just put it all in a blender, added some random unrelated images, and then made some last-minute fixes to give it some sense of a narrative toward the end. It's like they used Oblique Strategies, but forgot to use the basic starting point: try to make what you're making (in this case a documentary).

Although the film is largely bookended by two renditions of Bowie's excellent 1996 semi-hit, "Hallo Spaceboy," the film exists almost entirely in the space between Ziggy and Let's Dance, those dozen years most commercially and critically fruitful for Bowie. That too seems a shame, since we're only treated to brief mentions of his prior and subsequent life, personal and artistic. That sends the message that the only artistically important part of his life was the same period where he effectively had no family (or so the film seems to argue).

To that end, we're hit over the head repeatedly with the fact that Let's Dance was the least creative of his albums up to then, as though that creative drought stayed true for the subsequent decades. The words "Tin Machine," for example, are never once uttered. (Neither are "Pet Shop Boys," his collaborator for the aforementioned first rendition of "Hallo Spaceboy.").

Instead, most of the non-musical part consists of Bowie interviews. Had these been properly contextualized - with music and biography - they could have given a good portrait of the artist. Instead, they're interspersed with contemporaneous (but not necessarily related) concert performances, some cut, some altered, most with extraneous imagery.

The concert footage is the film's saving grace, but the format still got tiring. The audience was the most restless audience I'd seen in a movie geared toward adults. At the end, one woman's biggest complaint was how it totally ignored the members of Bowie's band. I thought that was odd to focus on, but it did exemplify how much was left out of the film to make room for archival interviews, always of Bowie himself. Without better artistic contextualization, these interviews all start to sound like a bit of celebrity navel-gazing, and I had to resist the urge to respect Bowie less coming out of the theater than I did going in. But then I realized that that's the filmmakers' fault, not Bowie's. Such a shame, though.