David Byrne’s American Utopia: Here

American Utopia: it’s quite a name, fitting for an artistic project that David Byrne released first, in 2018, as a full-length album, then turned into a concert tour that hit twenty-six countries across more than one hundred performances, evolving as it went. He next reimagined it as an elaborate but intimate production for the Broadway stage, a conceptual work about the inward self turning outward—learning to shift its attention from its own contours toward making sense of everything going on outside, in the minds and lives of other people and in the world at large, and discovering the satisfactions that such connection offers.

That show closed on its own terms in February 2020—a month before COVID-19-induced lockdowns would have shut it down anyway (it would have another uplifting run in 2021–22). There is no future in nostalgia—if anything, the experience of American public life since American Utopia’s release in album form has been an object lesson in the mortal dangers of a blinkered romanticization of the past. Even so, it’s difficult now, in 2025, to look back at that moment in early 2020 without yearning for a near past. The world changed between that February and the release of the American Utopia film later that year. It has continued to shift under our feet in the years since, and the cultural psyche with it. Let us count the ways. Perhaps that is what makes that moment seem just close enough to touch but far gone enough to feel, from our current vantage, irreconcilable if not impossible.

The Spike Lee–directed film version of the show, David Byrne’s American Utopia, premiered in September 2020 amid mask mandates, vaccine trials, wildfires, and ongoing protests against police violence. It documents a live performance of songs from the album American Utopia, mixed with various crowd-pleasers from the catalog of the Talking Heads, Byrne’s seminal post-punk band—foot-stompers like “Burning Down the House” and “Once in a Lifetime”—and “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout),” a protest song by Janelle Monáe. Interspersed with these songs is a series of spotlit interludes in which Byrne speaks directly to the audience. Introducing “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” from the 2018 album, he notes that he wrote the song in a mood of wariness: the lines “Now everybody’s coming to my house / And I’m never gonna be alone” are not sung with a sense of invitation. But, he tells us, he heard a rendition by a high-school choir from Detroit that took those same lyrics and infused them with welcome, with a sense of joy at the possibility of community. American Utopia is as much about trying to be as it is about trying to see. It is driven less by a thesis than by an emergent curiosity about what this kind of shift in meaning makes possible, a thrilled fascination delivered in Byrne’s likable, exploratory tone, gently informative like something out of a public-television special. “Most of us are immigrants,” the Scottish-born Byrne tells us, “and we couldn’t do it without them.”

For many viewers, to watch American Utopia is to do so with Stop Making Sense in mind. That deservedly canonized 1984 collaboration with Jonathan Demme helped turn the concert film into an art form and, by way of Byrne’s stage performance in it, the rock front man into a figure of cinematic iconography. American Utopia expands on that earlier work by being—markedly, intentionally—an effort to create something more interactive, bringing the audience into the fold in precisely the ways Byrne describes, in his monologue-interludes, to escape his own mind and peer into everyone else’s, leaving the self behind in search of some galvanizing togetherness.

Lee is said to have seen the show twenty times in preparation for making the film, which uses eleven cameras positioned around and above the stage to capture the dynamic, angular sense of movement built into the visual scheme of the show. There was something new to see each time: Annie-B Parson, a choreographer of “everyday life,” in her words, created both the movement and the musical staging, and she gives us an abundance to see despite, or more likely because of, a set design that is emphatically spare. Her art reveals the art-making inherent in the mundane process of being—the everyday both literalized and given renewed context. The show’s movement vocabulary is a class of the odd and the familiar. There are twelve people who appear onstage in various configurations throughout American Utopia: Byrne, a pair of backup singers and dancers (Chris Giarmo—a member of Parson’s company—and Tendayi Kuumba), and various instrumentalists, six of whom are charged with playing over fifty different percussion instruments throughout the show, which lends the music the Afro-Latin flair familiar to Byrne’s music but rendered sparkling and unusual here. Their mix of sounds, the overt emphasis on combining and adapting culturally specific expression into these new forms onstage, is a political argument for diversity and inclusion in itself. But what Byrne never forgets is that it is also, simply, powerful music—music worth moving to. Lee’s eleven cameras mean we can see the audience get up out of their seats, even see—late in the show—that a camera mounted on the balcony is shaking from people’s stomping.

It’s this that makes American Utopia such a unique document: the balance the show strikes between concert and generative, near-spiritual rite of togetherness. It all plays out as if in a curious and inviting vacuum of spectacle, almost like a transmission from outer space, with the performers emerging onto the stage from the void beyond it, inviting our own projections from the audience. Aluminum chain (13.75 miles of it, weighing over 3,000 pounds) lines the back and sides of the stage like sheer walls of chain mail, and Rob Sinclair’s lighting—another genius component of the collaboration—is manipulated, at times, to cast Byrne’s giant shadow onto the backdrop like that of some looming god. Byrne’s attitude, to be clear, is never godlike. Yet the performance, which moves swiftly through its program of freshly arranged songs, with Byrne’s expositions stitching them together into an unbroken strand of ideas, is towering.

The show starts with “Here,” from the album American Utopia, and with Byrne holding a brain, presenting it to us as both offering and indication: here is where we are; here is where we are going; this is the terrain that, within the figurative four walls of the theater, we will share. Later, he’ll tell us that he once turned to television to help him get a sense of what the rest of the world was thinking, and in the song that follows, “I Should Watch TV,” he quotes more than once from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”—an unsurprising point of reference for a program predicated on the fluid curiosities and combinations of bodies, souls, and styles. The American Utopia of Byrne’s vision is so inherently democratic that he even urges people to register to vote, at booths set up for that purpose in the theater lobby. His interest is in increasing representation: only 20 percent of the public participates in local elections, he tells us, lighting up one block of the audience to visualize the meagerness of that proportion. There are too few of us speaking for the many, is the lesson, and there is too little curiosity about what that means.

For his 2015 project Contemporary Color, Byrne orchestrated a series of collaborations between color-guard teams—whose elaborate choreographed routines are usually accompanied by a marching band or drum corps—and musicians performing live onstage. That work was also documented, by filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross, in the 2016 movie of the same name. Byrne is no stranger to the utility of apple-pie American spectacle as a cultural language, an ethnographic patchwork conducive to both performing and understanding ourselves. Always in focus is the genius Byrne sees in the mundane or the overlooked—the fascinations of so-called flyover country and its people, for example (never more beautifully than in his 1986 fiction film True Stories, inspired by tabloid headlines, in which he acts as the viewer’s guide to a small Texas town and the Celebration of Specialness its inhabitants are planning for the state’s sesquicentennial). In American Utopia, as in Contemporary Color, we see a form of Americana turned to Byrne’s own ends—his fellow performers stepping in formation like a chamber marching band, down to the harnesses strapping them to their instruments. It is thanks to Lee and cinematographer Ellen Kuras that we understand how thoroughly this idea has been rendered onstage, as their approach to adapting American Utopia to the screen seems to have been to preserve its quirks as thoroughly as possible.

The kiss of death for this genre is when it flattens the textures of live performance into mere visual recording, with all the life onstage—all the enunciation, spit, sweat, and chemistry between audience and performer—lost somewhere in the transition from one form to another. In American Utopia, Lee avoids this pitfall as adeptly as Demme did, by availing himself of the new work’s new attitude. Everyone here knows that this is Broadway, not a band shell, and rises to the occasion. And yet the cameras and the editing offer something that the Beaux-Arts auditorium of the Hudson Theatre could not: shots of the stage from above. This opportunity afforded only to us film viewers makes us aware of just how beautifully Parson, Byrne, and the rest of their collaborators have arranged it all, and how deftly the show mixes that structure with the variability of live performance. Formations appear, disappear, reiterate, soloists emerge and then melt back into the whole, with a teasing thematic intelligence. We can see the coming together inherent to the ideas that Byrne has laid out for us—his impulse toward finding a unifying power in individual quirk especially.

There comes a point when the percussiveness of the music climaxes and pushes the show into its most political territory: Byrne’s rendition of Monáe’s “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout),” which was originally written in honor of Sandra Bland and is frequently revised when new names must be added to its litany of Black Americans lost to the police and other forms of racial violence. Byrne tells us that after he saw Monáe perform the song at the Women’s March on Washington in 2017, he asked her if she would mind a white dude of a certain age adapting and covering the song, and got her go-ahead. In truth, there is nothing incongruent about Byrne’s attraction to the number. The rhythms drive us forward. Photographs of the faces behind the names chanted onstage—Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, George Floyd, we could name them all—appear on-screen before us, in a sleight of hand from Lee that again reminds us that this film is a film. “There’s a lot that I love about America,” Byrne has said. “There’s a lot that I totally despise. Sometimes the two get mixed together.” We feel it here most clearly: the rendering of a form Byrne loves into a protest against what he hates about this country, performed in the same pared-down style as the rest of American Utopia, with the entire band onstage, visible and collectively accounted for in their anger. David Byrne’s American Utopia was filmed in a world on the cusp of devastating, if also historically predictable, change. That is what makes watching it an occasion for some sorrow mixed in with the pull to heed its call to jubilant community, though Byrne’s is not a world of sorrow. It urges us to look, with clear eyes, both ahead and back—toward what is coming and what has been lost.

David Byrne’s American Utopia: Here

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