Moonage Daydream: “Who Is He? What Is He?”

Moonage Daydream, Morgen’s third music documentary (his first was the 2012 Rolling Stones portrait Crossfire Hurricane), similarly embodies its star. The director’s heightened, expressionistic approach allows the viewer to observe the biographical subject from the outside while also, in some sense, being that person by getting inside his imagination and worldview.

The film is rich in content from Bowie’s entire career, but it focuses on the period that stretches from 1972, when he achieved massive success with his Ziggy persona, to the peak of his global superstardom in the eighties. Throughout, the documentary overflows with previously unseen performance footage. From the 1973 Ziggy Stardust farewell show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon comes a medley of “The Jean Genie” and the Beatles’ “Love Me Do,” with Jeff Beck guesting on guitar; the midseventies U.S. Soul Tour yields an intense performance of the Diamond Dogs ballad “Rock ’n’ Roll with Me”; and in an excerpt from Bowie’s triumphant 1978 return to London’s Earls Court, where he had played a legendary concert five years earlier, we hear “Heroes” and the eerie instrumental “Warszawa.” Later rarities include footage of Bowie performing a dance duet in 1988 with Louise Lecavalier, the star performer of the company La La La Human Steps.

The musical content is anything but a standard hits package: provocatively, the first featured number is a thunderous “Hallo Spaceboy,” a track from the eccentric, polarizing 1995 album Outside, while “Space Oddity,” arguably the signature Bowie song, isn’t heard until an hour in. Morgen is irreverent with the music. Using stems provided by Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti, the director collaborated with sound mixer Paul Massey (who won an Academy Award in 2019 for his work on the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody) to present the songs in new ways, sometimes stripping them down, sometimes leaking one number into another. The overall effect of Morgen’s selections and his treatment of them is to at once defamiliarize the star’s catalog and remove them from the strict chronology of his career. Another example of the film’s general eschewing of such linearity comes when the sound of a Balinese gamelan from the artist’s Asian travels in the eighties is leaked into the 1978 “Warszawa” performance, as if Bowie the deracinated wanderer was by that point already present on the scene.

The images undergo a mash-up process too—notably in the hectic fugue of the film’s prelude. The funereal imagery of Johan Renck’s video for “★” from Bowie’s 2016 swan song, is juxtaposed with space footage from Roman Kroitor and Colin Low’s 1960 Canadian documentary short Universe, a print of which Bowie owned. Then comes the aforementioned flash flood of sci-fi imagery, including fragments from a film by Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, inserted between clips of diverse newsreel and archival material, some of which is searingly repainted in electric hues (the film is a tour de force for colorist Tyler Roth). Then we see young English fans in the first fevered burst of seventies Bowiemania, while on the voice-over we hear Dick Cavett introducing the singer on television in 1974: “Rumors and questions have arisen, such as ‘Who is he? What is he? Where did he come from? Is he a creature of a foreign power? Is he a creep? Is he dangerous?’ ”

Whereas Francis Whately thoroughly mapped Bowie’s biography and artistic breakthroughs in a series of documentaries broadcast on the BBC in the 2010s, Morgen has made a kaleidoscopic exploration of Bowie’s multiple selves: not only the performer but the myth, the autodidact, the Renaissance man, and the self-ironizing sage. Like last decade’s touring exhibition David Bowie Is, Moonage Daydream attempts to capture the singer’s slippery mutability.

Morgen casts Bowie as the narrator of his own career. Some of the most notable moments in the voice-over are drawn from outtakes from Inspirations, a 1997 film in which director Michael Apted quizzes several artists on their creative processes. We hear Bowie musing on religion, the universe, society, culture—sometimes cogently, but also sometimes artlessly, revealing his roots as a sixties bohemian magpie who latched on to whatever thoughts were in the air. We hear him speculate on time, on androgyny and the eternal quest for what he calls a “high-priest form,” and on the idea of “treating oneself as a bit of an experiment.”

Bowie emerges from Morgen’s film as a self-declared “generalist,” unabashedly identifying as a dilettante (“I was a Buddhist on Tuesday . . . I was into Nietzsche by Friday”). His image as a chameleon became common currency almost as soon as he achieved fame, but Morgen’s film puts all the metamorphoses on parade: the various manifestations of Ziggy; the frazzled wraith of the midseventies U.S. tours; the dapper eighties megastar; the weathered uptown bohemian, Pollocking his studio floor with paint. Strangest of all, perhaps, is the white-suited, melancholy flaneur around Asia—queuing at an Indian airport, riding hotel escalators, drifting into a strip club. These clips are from a travelogue-style documentary called Ricochet, directed by Gerry Troyna and released on VHS in 1984; the 16 mm negative of the largely forgotten film was unearthed in a London vault by Morgen’s archival producer, Jessica Berman-Bogdan, before being restored in 4K.

Moonage Daydream also draws on Bowie’s career in film and theater, and on the range of his acting personae: the stranded alien in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976); the title role in Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man (in which Bowie appeared on Broadway in 1980); the British soldier in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983); and the musician-vampire in Tony Scott’s glossy horror-romance The Hunger (1983). Morgen shuffles these images to suggest that they are all essentially Bowie; after all, the man was never purely a singer-songwriter but also a sometime mime artist and a self-consciously “cracked actor” (to quote the title of one of his songs).

The TV interviews with Bowie excerpted in the film contain a substantial amount of conscious performance, especially a teasing, flirty 1973 encounter with British host Russell Harty. (“Are they bisexual shoes?” Harty asks, referring to Bowie’s spectacular platform heels. “They’re shoe shoes, silly!” the star replies.) Nevertheless, they yield revealing glimmers of an apparently authentic self. In a 1979 interview, Bowie tells Mavis Nicholson about sheltering himself from love and feeling “like an empty vessel” when not writing or performing. His 1974 Cavett appearance touches on his upbringing: “A lot of emotional and spiritual mutilation goes on in my family.”

Moonage Daydream’s biographical content includes a brief section on the singer’s older half-brother, the late Terry Burns. Eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, Burns played a decisive role in introducing the young David to art, jazz, and Beat poetry. Bowie would in turn become a propagator of hip insider knowledge. Just as a generation discovered Iggy Pop and Lou Reed via Bowie’s early championing, his fans were also turned on to Jean Genet, Jacques Brel, Kahlil Gibran, and Aleister Crowley. Bowie also offered a vista of new sexual possibilities. His discussion of his bisexuality on Harty’s extremely mainstream show in 1973 was arguably as vital an eye-opener for young Britain as his legendary performance of “Starman” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops the previous July.

Some of the news footage included in Moonage Daydream reveals what Bowie’s openness about his sexuality meant back then, however superficial some of its effects. Among a group of makeup-wearing fans of all genders circa 1973, a girl says, “No one’s afraid to walk around like that now—he’s broken a barrier” (even if many of the boys in the shot blokeishly fit the glam-era stereotype once mocked in the British music press as “brickies [bricklayers] in mascara”).

Bowie’s revolutionary impact in this respect tended to be obscured in the eighties by his reinvention as a suavely relatable entertainer, which is why Todd Haynes’s reclamation of the star’s queerness in the 1998 fantasy Velvet Goldmine was so important. While Moonage Daydream arguably downplays this dimension in the years following Bowie’s early-seventies breakthrough, the original charge of his sexual display emerges vividly in the 1973 concert footage, with shots that come in tight on Ziggy’s crotch and the expanses of pale thigh revealed by his costumes. The world was still reeling from the shock of Bowie’s alien-sex-bomb phase when he moved on to other, often less erotic guises.

Compiling pieces of the Bowie persona, Morgen’s film is a son-et-lumière shrine to a self-created pop god. Its bombardment of the senses invites the viewer to partake in a rapturous celebration of Bowie as idol and idea, as well as omnivorous consumer and transformer of his own cultural age. For longtime fans, Moonage Daydream captures the thrill of reliving a shared history—one that, for some, goes back several decades—while for beginners it offers an introduction to the world of an icon who was protean and provocative like no other.

This piece includes portions of an article Romney wrote for the October 2022 issue of Sight and Sound.​​