Moonage Daydream (2022)

PG-13...and that is wild.  Straight up wild.  A lot of the form of Moonage Daydream is a mixture of psychadelic imagery from concerts, interviews, music videos, and films.  A lot of these films aren't Bowie's because they reflect Bowie as an artist.  One of those images is straight up two people having sex and you see everything.  I kept on wondering what I was going to write in this section because the movie touches on questionable territory.  But when I saw that scene, I was like, "Easy answer. This movie is R."  Nope.  If that scene wasn't in the movie, I could squint and see the PG-13.  Bowie dresses provocatively and there are some questionable camera angles.  But that shot was, like, "Whoa."  So, an odd PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Brett Morgen

I am all over the place with this documentary.  I'm between loving this movie and thinking it's "meh."  I hate the term "meh" for this movie because this is the quintessential passion project.  This is such unfiltered passion towards a subject matter that I cannot help but think that Brett Morgen is somehow obsessed with Bowie.  But from an outside perspective, there are moments where I could not wait for the documentary to be over.

I'm going to give you the key to my enjoyment for the movie.  The last thirty minutes are exactly what I needed for the film.  Morgen is crazy smart.  Watching this documentary, you can't help but see more than a little bit of genius.  But this is not a documentary in the sense that you learn much about Bowie.  Morgen intentionally stays away from the Wikipedia version of a documentary.  Most of this movie feels like a painfully honest love letter.  I don't know how much I learned about David Bowie from watching this movie in terms of fun facts that I could share on the blog.  Instead, the movie is kind of like falling in love.  I know more of the soul of David Bowie because of Moonage Daydream than I do about anything specific about the man.  And a lot of that love for David Bowie is an embrace of Bowie's philosophy, especially when it came to making art.

See, I really dig David Bowie.  I say that as an absolute outsider when it comes to music.  For all of the dorky things that I obsess over, music is my weak spot.  I listen to podcasts, audio plays, and audiobooks sooner than listening to music.  My thirteen-year-old daughter is now aggressively getting into music.  In the same way that my taste in music is somewhat unfortunate, she's kind of learning about dorkier songs.  But David Bowie's music --at least the era of Bowie that I bonded with --is kind of perfect for that world.  Bowie's more esoteric and psychadelic stuff appealed to the outsider and the mainstreamer alike.  It's really weird.  It's counterculture --despite the fact that it had mass appeal.  It was strange and bizarre and it reflected its creator.  When I say that I'm into Bowie, it's that Ziggy Stardust, I'm-a-weird-dude energy that I got into.

But if you ask Spotify to play Bowie, it's rarely what you want it to be.  I'm sure that lots of artists who really hang on there experience this problem, the music of Bowie isn't one thing.  I used a billion words to say that the documentary, without being completely explicit about it, is about how David Bowie refused to be the guy who just did one thing.  As much as I love that early Bowie sound, much of Bowie's catalogue wasn't that.  After all, Bowie did a commercial for Pepsi with Tina Turner.  That's quite a distance away from a guy who dressed up in feminine clothing and frustrated TV hosts who tried to pin him down.  I mean, the doc even teased that his song, "Changes" is probably the most appropriate song to encapsulate an artists who strived to find himself.

And that's where the paradox of David Bowie lies in Moonage Daydream.  For a two-hour-and-fifteen minute film, there is a continual throughline of the notion that David Bowie is constantly about discovery.  For the most part, that's a noble notion.  Bowie, as he should, should be uncomfortable in his art.  He states something that I've heard a thousand times before.  Forgive my poor paraphrasing, but a comfortable artist is a bad artist.  As much as me, the music luddite, really likes Bowie's early stuff and dislikes the more jazzy Pepsi generation stuff, it's all about those changes that he sang about.  That's admirable.  Bowie wouldn't have been Bowie if he stayed Ziggy Stardust the entire time.  

But what I dig, and Morgan devotes the last section of the movie to, is that not all change is healthy change.  He's not going as far as I am, saying that some of Bowie's stuff is kind of not great.  This is never a critique on taste.  Instead, he does include moments from Bowie segueing to the '90s.  Part of Bowie's transition to the '90s was this almost intentional choice to go apolitical.  He keeps saying that there's no real lofty messaging to some of his songs.  When he's asked if he's selling out, he gives that patented response saying that income doesn't have tie to artistic merit.  Maybe it's because I'm getting so gosh darned political nowadays, but I can't help but scoff a little bit at this attitude.  I believe Morgen also kind of has thoughts on this commentary because the film doesn't leave off with "vanilla Bowie."  It acknowledges that this era brought a lot of listeners and those listeners are valid Bowie fans.  But it also leaves Bowie in this unfulfilled era.

That's where the core of change is.  Bowie's desire to go through all of these change come from an admitted not understanding himself.  Like how the media who interviewed Bowie found him to be enigmatic, Bowie reflected the same frustration in himself.