Last night I attended a midnight screening of Brett Morgen‘s Moonage Daydream, a splashy, busy-bee, all-over-the-place, paint-splatter documentary about the great David Bowie, who passed a little more than six years ago.
I was filled with excitement as I walked up the red-carpet staircase, and less than a half-hour into it I was feeling…well, partially impressed but increasingly deflated. It starts off like a house on fire, but it wore me down with all the frenetic energy.
It’s strictly for Bowie fans who know the whole story, but I wanted clarity and focus — stuff that would broaden my Bowie vistas, and certainly deliver more than just an audio-visual assault with clips of this and that. Early on I was going “okay, enough with the Ziggy Stardust concert footage…move on to something else, Jesus.”
I know how this sounds, but because it was late I wanted a little meditation and reflection, and I began to feel annoyed by the absence of the usual-usual — no calm-down portions, no talking-head perspectives (which are stylistically old-hat, of course, but comforting), not enough focus on Bowie’s films or stories about the making of them. And I really wanted to see footage and anecdotes and whatnot from the pre-Ziggy period (late ’60s to Hunky Dory).
There’s a brief section in which Bowie is heard talking about his half-brother Terry, who turned young David onto the cooler subterranean side of things, culturally and musically. Poor Terry eventually succumbed to schizophrenia and spent the rest of his life in med wards. I related to this as my late sister Laura also went schizy (in her mid teens) and suffered a similar fate.
Within 15 minutes I noticed three or four Zoomers getting up and leaving. And then a couple more. After 35 or 40 minutes a friend I attended with did the same. I quit just past the one-hour mark. No way was I sitting through all 134 minutes. It was fucking 1 am, I’d been up since 7, I’d written all day and then seen the Park Chan-wook and the Cronenberg…later.
It’s not that I don’t respect Morgan avoiding conventional doc schemes, but Moonage Daydream doesn’t let you breathe and is scattered all over the map, or at least as far as the first hour is concerned.