One of the greatest and most important pop-rock musicians of all time, David Bowie, finally got a biographical documentary. And what kind! Brett Morgen (Jane, Cobain: Montage of Heck) made a sensational film, an avant-garde journey into Bowie’s universe that completely deviates from the classic notion of a biographical documentary. It’s not even close to one of those generic biographical documentaries in which archival footage of the protagonist plays, and countless faces sit in armchairs and talk about how wonderful and beautiful he was and recall various anecdotes from his life. “Moonage Daydream” is a real Tour de Force, a film made for the big screen that tries to grasp the genius of David Bowie in an original and exciting way and a film that, despite its duration of 135 minutes, does not seem stretched for even a second and one has the impression that one could watch it for hours.
Through his life and artistic story, through what drove and haunted him, Bowie himself guides us as a narrator through archival recordings. And he deals primarily with the internal, and Morgen must really be honored because not only did he obviously spend years and years digging through the rich and huge archive, but he connected it all brilliantly in the editing. Bowie’s concert recordings, his thoughts and observations about life, death, philosophy, art and the motivation that forced him to constantly come up with something new and be different, ahead of everyone and ahead of time, are constantly intertwined here. All of this is enriched with fragments from numerous famous films, as well as films in which Bowie himself acted, most notably Roegg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth”, in which Bowie embodied an alien who descended to Earth.
And Bowie really seems like an alien, like a living Ziggy Stardust who landed on our planet from another planet and decided to change and shake it up for all time. Bowie himself talks only in fragments about the details from his childhood that shaped him, about the loneliness and trauma he survived when his older brother was hospitalized due to schizophrenia, and the fear that he himself was mentally ill. About how this fear and the need to be different, his own, to experiment in practically all branches of art, from music, for which he is of course best known, through painting, sculpture, film and theater, was a kind of way for him to escape from reality, but and adapts that reality to himself.
Bowie is great and deep, he perfectly analyzes himself, but also the world around him, which interested and impressed him from the beginning, forcing him to express himself and try to create his own microcosm. His need to constantly escape from some zone of comfort and safety, lethargy and complacency, which many of his colleagues lulled into when they achieved fame, fortune and success, is fantastic. But Bowie, he says, simply couldn’t do that and when he realized that he felt good and was successful, he would have to start from the beginning and create something new, something completely different. I think his thinking is genius that he didn’t really care too much about what people thought and he didn’t want to live up to the tastes and satisfy the desires that were expected of him, but he did almost exclusively what he wanted and what would meet the high criteria he set for himself. imposed.