Of all the notable deaths in the past decade, I still haven’t got over the demise of David Bowie. Even though his corporal body was given to a higher power — whatever that power is — his true testament is the art he created for the world, be it music, film or, as we soon learn, paintings.
A cinematic obituary wasn’t enough for Bowie, but director Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream deliberately tries and, in the end, virtually succeeds in giving the world a succinct portrait of the man and the many different masks he wore, starting with a true space oddity.
Bowie’s sound and vision collide in the electronic dirge of “Hallo Spaceboy” and working from here, there and anywhere; apparently, there is no linear time in this cinematic pool. With beakers and test tubes swirling around him, the androgynous facade makes its way into the dawn of Ziggy Stardust and beyond. And like an ever-changing spider from Mars, he slithers and recoils past the Thin White Duke, later emboldened with the junkie Kraftwerk periods, with a little man who fell to Earth in between. Blue, blue, electric blue, surrounded with his coke spoons and heroin drips, the late ’70s are a complete haze of sobriety.
With his schizophrenic brother and sleepy mother in their well-tooled coffins, riffs of lilting heroes (we can be them, you know) placate the creation of plastic pop that devolved into the 1980s and the great isolation that same with it. But, after a few years of intense solitude, he became an industrial icon and well-rounded artist well into his death in 2016.
I have purchased this documentary on two separate occasions: once, after my debilitating stroke, and now, as part of the Criterion Collection. After each and every screening, it plays more like a masterwork of one man’s life, with layers of complexity that take the good and the bad, with no narration or talking heads. Even though we will never truly know Bowie, Morgen gives us the whole kinetic picture, albeit covered in spacey debris.
Truly remarkable in its dreamlike way, Moonage Daydream is an open-curtain, open-air market to the life of this artist, with every persona, character and alter ego cataloged for further inspection. —Louis Fowler
Beloved memories from your childhood are primed for slaughter again. As if the same cast members, stretch of UK property and general lackadaisical approach to the creative process don’t immediately give it away, the shilling-ante slasher 
