Interlude: The trouble with Moonage Daydream

Stepping away briefly from our exploration of Bowie’s spiritual odyssey, here’s my review of a new film aiming to portray his life and work

A publicity image for Moonage Daydream (BMG/Neon/Universal Pictures)

Up and down he goes, on a brightly lit escalator, up and down, down and up, our lonely lovely blond short god, alone because - like, derr. Who could get near him?

There he is again look, in a deserted shopping mall, sitting down there by some unfestive Christmas trees, all on his own, because - I mean, he’s Bowie, right? He’s our otherworldly genius suited alien. (We’ll forget for a moment that someone else was there, someone who happened to have a camera.)

Now, check out this superhuman as he tries to relate to nonsuperhumans! They walk: he glides. They look: he gazes. They will be changed forever by this encounter with the divine.

Moonage Daydream is not the first work to mythologise the man. But I think the way it does so is troubling. Because what sets it apart from all manner of other of biographies, be they filmed or written, is that it has been produced with the approval and co-operation of the Bowie estate. The implication is that this is the Bowie the priestly brand managers want us to see. In which case, I’m up for some blasphemy.

The film is directed by Brett Morgen and can be seen now in cinemas across the UK. In many ways, it is impressive, and it is clearly the product of a lot of work and genuine affection. It eschews the form of the standard biopic, preferring collage and montage and hacked-up footage and mashed-up songs; narration is provided by Bowie himself, in the form of excerpts from interviews. This is often effective on a visceral level, and seems of a piece with Bowie’s butterfly mind and paltry attention span. And Bowie obviously makes a fine lead character: his performances are astonishing, and his reflections on life - his own, and that of humanity - are often wise and touching.

The problem is that the Bowie of Moonage Daydream is barely human. And this is a problem not simply because it is a misrepresentation, but because it ends up paradoxically underselling him. David Bowie the god is no match for David Bowie the man.

The Bowie we see here is untethered, deracinated and sanitised, too pure and brilliant to need anyone else. So there is no mention of his first wife, Angie, without whom Ziggy Stardust would never have looked as he did. There is no mention of Mick Ronson, without whom Ziggy Stardust would never have sounded as he did. There is no mention of Carlos Alomar, on whom Bowie depended to lead his band from 1975 to 1980. There is no mention of Tony Visconti, on whom Bowie relied to produce so many of his records. There is no mention of Nile Rodgers, who fulfilled Bowie’s desire for a global hit album through his work on Let’s Dance. The truth is that Bowie was never a great musician and might well have amounted to little without the talent of others. Rather, he had a remarkable gift for choosing collaborators; but you would never know this from Moonage Daydream, which is a misleading and sadly ungenerous film as a result.

The other benefit of these collaborators was that they helped ground him. He was a generalist: they were specialists. He acknowledged this; indeed, he celebrated this, and typically afforded them a great degree of freedom. And they were working with him in a particular studio in a particular place at a particular moment. The film suggests he hurtled through time, emitting random pieces of music along the way. But the material really matters: it is why things turned out as they did.

This is connected to the film’s condescending attitude towards chronology, which is always a complicated matter with Bowie. Most of his (few) big ideas were established early, and would then surface at various points throughout his career. Pieces would draw upon much earlier pieces and foreshadow much later pieces, and it is easy to understand why a director might want to draw parallels between disparate parts of the same career. There is an awful lot of darting about beneath the film’s broadly chronological arc, but a clear sense of what happened when is essential for an understanding of Bowie’s work: Low could never have come between Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, for example; The Man Who Sold The World would never have appeared between Let’s Dance and Tonight. They are products of a particular time and a particular place. The works themselves may well explore rootlessness and alienation, but that does not mean they are rootless and alienated. (All this also about an artist whose fans can temporally locate any one of his hairstyles to within three months.)

It is no surprise that Moonage Daydream contains barely a trace of humour: after all, gods are not known for their comedy. Again, this sells Bowie short. A sense of the absurd was rarely far from his work, but Moonage Daydream resiles from it. It takes Bowie far more seriously than he did. His awareness of his own preposterousness helped save him from pomposity; he liked surrounding himself with people who would bring him down at least one peg. He would often undercut portentous statements by following them with mundanities delivered in funny voices. There is an earthiness running through much of his work; to miss it is to make it flimsy and flyaway. It really is OK to laugh at him: he recorded The Laughing Gnome, for goodness’ sake, not that you would know it from this.

There are simple mistakes and misinterpretations, too. The Glass Spider tour, which travelled to stadiums around the world in 1987, is portrayed as the nadir of his attempts to placate his newfound mainstream audience. But it wasn’t that at all: it was an attempt to revive the more theatrical and avant-garde aspects of his live shows, aspects that had been missing since 1974. He hired street dancers to give the show a contemporary edge; he described the accompanying album, Never Let Me Down, as a continuation from Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), the album he made before Let’s Dance catapulted him to superstardom. The problem with the Glass Spider tour was not that it lacked creativity, but that it had too much.

Allied to this is the creation of a false dichotomy between his supposedly artistically pure 1970s and his corrupted, commercial 1980s. In truth, many of his decisions during the 1970s were motivated not by single-minded integrity but by a desire for commercial success. He wrote Starman at the behest of his record label, which felt the Ziggy Stardust album needed a stand-out single; indeed, Ziggy Stardust the character was popular by design. The album Young Americans was far more rough and rootsy in its initial incarnation, before its glossy makeover helped it establish him in the USA; Bowie initially intended Station to Station to sound harsh and dry, but he later decided to make it more lush, warm and reverberant to broaden its appeal.

Ah yes, albums. Part of the amorphous feel of the film is attributable to the fact that albums are ignored at the expense of a vast patchwork of songs. But Bowie was primarily an album artist; those albums were not random collections of songs but were, for the most part, his definitive artefacts. In Moonage Daydream, barely any album is acknowledged by name, which again serves to sever the blooms from their roots.

There is a further source of bafflement. Morgen was given access to Bowie’s apparently vast archive, and spent years exploring it. And yet the yield is almost comically meagre. Almost all the clips are available on YouTube: worse than that, much of the footage actually seems to be from YouTube. Morgen makes noble attempts to play the resulting blockiness and pixelation as a deliberate aesthetic, but one is left asking whether this is really the best that could have been done. There is scant footage from the apparently dazzling 1974 tour; from the 1976 tour, often said to be his best, there is barely anything but readily available rehearsal footage. The 1978 tour is the only one to which Moonage Daydream does any justice, and it is arguably the highlight of the film. But is that really all there is?

Other fans have criticised the lack of material from the early 1990s onwards. The general viewer may be left thinking he did only two songs after meeting Iman: Hallo Spaceboy in 1995 and Blackstar in 2016 (there were in fact nine albums). I happen to think this is one of the film’s more forgivable sins: Moonage Daydream is long enough as it is, and much as I love a lot of that work, I appreciate that not many people would buy tickets to hear it. But by ignoring his work with Tin Machine in the late 1980s, the film misses one of his most significant artistic turns: much that followed would have been impossible without it.

Indeed, the film seems rather more fussy about itself than it is about Bowie. It takes great care to show how clever it is, but is careless elsewhere, including in the credits: the official name of the 1978 tour was not Stage but Isolar II; a song is listed as Ian Fish, rather than its actual name, Ian Fish, U.K. Heir (this is important not just because details are important but because the name is an anagram of Hanif Kureishi, who wrote The Buddha of Suburbia, the television adaptation for which Bowie wrote the soundtrack, from which the song derives).

We are left then with a film that promises much and superficially delivers more, but actually gives very little; and what it gives is profoundly flawed. There is no obvious lack of stuff here, and you could have a wonderful time watching it without knowing what’s not here. But what’s not here is so important that it means Moonage Daydream is not really about David Bowie at all. Rather, it’s about what someone evidently wants David Bowie to be, and what his posthumous handlers want us to think he was: a lone and unique intergalactic space genius who needed no one. In this sense, it could be regarded as just as cynical as any number of Bowie’s attempts to cash in during the 1980s. It is not entirely lacking in heart - a section about his half-brother is particularly affecting - and obviously we all have our own Bowie, and obviously there will never be a definitive Bowie film. But the concern is that Moonage Daydream thinks it is that film and is presented as that film.

Bowie may well have embraced aspects of postmodernism, but sometimes a stand must be taken for old-fashioned concepts like truth and accuracy. This is especially important in a film wanting not only to be about the life and art of an individual, but about life and art themselves. The danger is that many who see it will end up with entirely the wrong idea about how Bowie went about making his art, and may end up judging themselves harshly by comparison. A truer film, in all senses, would celebrate the role of collaboration and relationships in the creation of art, and the requirement of vulnerability and even weakness on the part of the artist. This is perhaps where Bowie’s greatness truly lay; but to admit this is to concede that he was just another flawed man who needed a lot of help.

If Moonage Daydream is the Gospel According to Brett, let’s hope there are at least three more to come, plus a few that get rejected from the canon. After all, we could do with a bit more heresy around here.

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