David Bowie’s Dazzling ‘Moonage Daydream’: A Superfan’s Review of the First Graduate School-Level Music Documentary

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor The first thing to know before seeing “Moonage Daydream,” Brett Morgen’s dazzling, exhaustive and exhausting memoir of David Bowie’s life and career, is that it assumes the viewer already knows a lot about the subject — his relevance, his influence, the brilliance of so much of his music, and the basics of his personal history.

Like another recent historical film about an oft-trodden subject — Todd Haynes’ “The Velvet Underground” — it eschews the standard, chronological, done-to-death “Behind the Music”-style template that has become a predictable default for music documentaries and finds a dramatically different way to tell the story.

In the case of “Moonage Daydream” — the significance of the second word of the title in this impressionistic film cannot be overemphasized — that different way is to let the man himself do all of the talking: Literally the only voiceovers heard in this 135-minute-long film are from Bowie (presenting real or conveniently fictionalized accounts of his life and work) and various interviewers.

While that makes for an unusually free-form approach to structuring a documentary (and was enormously challenging for Morgen, who worked on the film for over four years and suffered a heart attack while doing it), in many ways it’s freeing: Instead of a rigid timeline or forced, overarching theme dictating the narrative, Bowie’s words do.