Moonage Daydream

If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further than you think you can go into the water. Push yourself past your limit. And when you feel that your feet aren't quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting

(David Bowie)

Trying to reconstruct on film a personality as multifaceted, enigmatic and elusive by definition as that of David Bowie was an almost impossible undertaking. Brett Morgen, already active in the field of docu-music with previous works like “Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck” and “Crossfire Hurricane” (on the Rolling Stones), decided to take a radically different path: not a documentary, but an immersive experience, a journey (an interstellar one, of course) into the mind of the Man Who Fell to Earth, of the man who was Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, the neo-romantic pierrot of “Ashes To Ashes”, the platinum rocker of “Let's Dance”, the cyber-industrial detective of “Outside” and a thousand other faces besides.

“Moonage Daydream” – in theaters for three days (September 26-27-28) after its successful run at Cannes and a preview taste in Imax cinemas – begins exactly like this: with an infiltration into the mind of the London-born artist. As if viewers had been implanted with the fateful chip from The Matrix, granting access to the labyrinthine mental pathways of the Thin White Duke. It starts with a twofold opening reflection: Bowie's voiceover quotes Nietzsche's thoughts on the meaning of life (“All people, no matter who they are, hope to appreciate life more, but it's what you do in life that's important, not how much time you have or what you wanted to do. Life is fantastic”), then, as the liquid, stellar notes of “Ian Fish, U.K. Heir” (from “The Buddha Of Suburbia”, 1993) flow by, he dwells on time, “one of the most complex expressions that memory has ever made manifest, something that hovers between past and future without ever being fully present... You find yourself struggling to grasp that deep and formidable mystery. Everything is transitory. Does it matter? Am I interested?”. But before we can even begin to imagine an answer, we're catapulted onto a spaceship at the speed of light, riding the hammering beats of “Hallo Spaceboy” (1995), eyes wide open before that kaleidoscope of sounds, images, colors and suggestions that will accompany us for the film's 140 minutes, peppered with film clips, songs, live footage and interview fragments.

To untangle the web of those five million rare and previously unseen items, drawings, recordings, films and magazines to which he was given access within the collection of the David Bowie Estate, the Norwegian director made another clear-cut choice: relying solely on the protagonist's own voice, forgoing the usual chorus of testimonials from friends, family and colleagues that typically populates documentaries. So, while on one hand this avoids the hagiographic reconstruction-by-proxy that often weighs down such narratives, on the other it remains faithfully anchored to a single point of view, Bowie's own. But what might seem like an all-too-“orthodox” choice, faithful to the party line – “Moonage Daydream” is also the only film officially approved by his estate – ends up instead becoming the source of countless doubts and contradictions. Just as many as those sown by the very life of the author of “Changes”, who never hesitated to question his own convictions: from his musical approach, always free yet capable of sudden shifts in perspective (the mainstream turn of “Let's Dance” and the subsequent, pharaonic “Serious Moonlight Tour” being emblematic), to his relationship with love, initially rejected and then wholeheartedly embraced in his happy union with supermodel Iman, whom he married in 1992. A continuous coming to terms with his own identity, questioning and questioning himself. After all, Bowie himself – in a crucial self-analysis interview halfway through the film – describes himself as “a collector”, thus compelled to ceaselessly synthesize and rework that inexhaustible mass of influences, philosophies and suggestions. “All my life I've hated banality and wanted to keep exploring unknown territories, making acquaintances, meeting people around the world, constantly being someone else. On Tuesday I was a Buddhist and by Friday I liked Nietzsche”, he confesses at one point.

It is Bowie, then, who guides Morgen's hand through the exploration of the many art forms he voraciously experimented with throughout his life: music, film, dance, painting, sculpture, video and audio collage, screenwriting, acting and live theatre. With a narrative that is never linear (very few dates, no captions or credits), unfolding as an imaginative, experimental flow of free association, following that “fascination with an artistic language dealing with fragments and chaos” that the London dandy repeatedly reaffirmed: “In the end, if I have to find a single thread running through everything I've done, it's this: reflecting chaos, trying to 'organize' it”, he concludes in the lucid final testament of thought.

There is, however, a vague chronological line, albeit broken up by the frequent back-and-forth between past and present. So we see young David, fatherless and given little affection by his mother, emerge from the London suburb of Brixton, spurred on by his half-brother Terry, who sets him on the path of art before abandoning him, succumbing to schizophrenia. And we witness the relentless charge of a career constantly played on the attack, starting with the glam epic, given ample space here (after all, “Moonage Daydream” is also the title of one of the finest songs of that era), with the ineffable Ziggy Stardust ready to dodge the questions of the more or less stiff British TV hosts (Dick Cavett, Russell Harty, Valerie Singleton, Mavis Nicholson, among others) with his arsenal of dazzling, enigmatic answers, especially those about his sexuality and his relationship with image. An androgynous alien with improbable make-up used as a passe-partout to dismantle conventions and boundaries – including rock's own – through grandiloquent glamour orchestrations and flaunted bisexuality (even in concert, with the memorable live scene of the guitar “fellatio” with Mick Ronson). Then, after the boom in England – also attested to by fan worship (in fact the only voices heard besides his own) – comes the period of the hated Los Angeles, an incubator of urban ghosts and toxic waste, yet capable of “helping him grow musically”; then the therapeutic landing in the Berlin of the trilogy with Brian Eno, where he could be reborn undisturbed because “nobody cared what you did”, and the return to England (including a moving reappearance in Brixton after so many years), but also the great world tours of the 80s (Serious Moonlight, Glass Spider), when the embrace of the mainstream risked compromising his integrity to the brink of a “Rock'n'roll Suicide” (a song not by chance used at that point in the film), followed by the arduous path of artistic reconstruction that would pass through the bold new gambles of the 90s (“Outside”, “Earthling”) and the plot twists that followed, right up to the artistic and spiritual testament of “Blackstar”.

A two-hour-and-20-minute full immersion, whipped up by frenzied editing and relentlessly punctuated by music (a dedicated double-CD soundtrack has been released) featuring no fewer than 48 songs: from “Space Oddity” to “Life On Mars?”, from “Quicksand” to “Aladdin Sane”, from “Word On A Wing” to “Modern Love”, from “D.J.” to “Ashes To Ashes”, from “Heroes” to a moving live “Warszawa” from the Isolar II tour with Carlos Alomar as bandleader (among the previously unreleased live tracks is also the “The Jean Genie/Love Me Do” medley, recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, during the final leg of the Ziggy Stardust tour). Tracks manipulated, deconstructed and blended into new mixes through a process that recalls the very cut-up technique of William Burroughs that Bowie used in the 70s to write his lyrics. With a star-studded team at work, including Tony Visconti, Bowie's longtime producer and right-hand man, Oscar-winning sound mixer Paul Massey (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) and David Giammarco (“Ford v. Ferrari”); the sound design team of John Warhurst and Nina Hartstone (“Bohemian Rhapsody”); and VFX producer Stefan Nadelman (“Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck”).

But in keeping with the Bowiean vision of “Sound And Vision,” there was bound to be a substantial cinematic component. So we also see footage flow by from some of the films that most helped shape the English artist's universe: “Un Chien Andalou,” “The Red Shoes,” “Nosferatu,” “8½,” “A Clockwork Orange,” alongside some of the White Duke's own historic forays onto the big screen (from “The Man Who Fell to Earth” to “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” and “The Hunger”), interwoven with the faces of life mentors such as Jack Kerouac (it was indeed “On the Road” that struck the young David like a bolt of lightning), Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, as well as paintings by Picasso, Otto Dix, Pollock, Meret Oppenheim, Francis Bacon. Brian Eno can be glimpsed, while, strangely, Iguana Iggy Pop is nowhere to be found.

All of this poured into Morgen's psychedelic blender: he spent four years assembling the film and another eighteen months designing the soundscape, the animations and the color palette. The result is a complex, disorienting audio-visual sensory experience that may not win over “neutral” viewers, but will certainly captivate fans, because “Moonage Daydream” really does resemble the film Bowie himself might have conceived and shot about his own life. The film of a man incredibly hungry for life, who claimed to have used himself as a canvas and to have ended every day of his time on earth thinking about what he had managed to receive and learn in those 24 hours. A waking dream through which to relive the “incredible life” of one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century culture and art.

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