DAvid Bowie was a collector of characters, personalities, styles and sounds. His life was a collage, so it makes sense that the new documentary Lunar Reverie plays like a kaleidoscopic explosion of color – like a feast, to borrow the title of a favorite Bowie song, sound and vision.
Watching the film feels like diving into a Bowie submersion tank, especially if you see it in IMAX. The outside world fades away as the room shakes and the images follow one another, here a sequence of concerts, there a deluge of vintage film clips. Among director Brett Morgen’s films, samples are The seventh seal, blade runner, A trip to the moon, 8 ½, A clockwork orange, Onibaba, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and dozens more. One way or another, they all speak fleetingly about the subject, its mercurial nature and its thematic obsessions.
The film has no narrator or talking head, save for Bowie himself and his many interviewers over the years, including Dick Cavett, who seems to find his way into just about any documentary. which touches on the 70s. The artist’s interlocutors seem determined to crack the Bowie code, a useless endeavor in that Bowie himself tried on identities like the costumes and dresses in which he performed the rituals of music and life. An interviewer asks a young Bowie if his dazzling kicks are “bisexual shoes”. The answer: “No, those are shoes, silly.” In effect. When Bowie impersonated self-immolated astronaut Ziggy Stardust, he was simply trying on another wardrobe, one with skin and soul. What is a pair of shoes in this grand scheme?
Lunar Reverie is above all a feat of editing. Morgen, whose previous musical records include Cobain: Editing Heck and the Rolling Stones portrait Hurricane Crossfire, also takes care of this task. Interspersed with experimental flourishes, audio and video excerpts of the artist’s observations give shape and context to the story of his existence. We learn very little about his childhood and youth; nevertheless, the Bowie who emerges here is deeply solitary, perhaps too comfortable in his isolation. For all explosive color, public idolatry and success, Lunar Reverie don’t back down from underlying sadness. Bowie tried out his different identities largely because he didn’t much like the one he was born and raised in.
Lunar Reverie is licensed by the Bowie Estate, and Morgen had access to an absurd amount of footage. Bowie was filmed a lot, not just before, during and after concerts, but in more intimate moments – playing with children in India, strolling through a Southeast Asian airport in a white linen suit, finding needed comfort and a creative renaissance in West Berlin. Morgen had the entire Bowie Vault at his disposal, and he used it, although he didn’t get into anything overly controversial or problematic. Bowie’s first marriage is not mentioned. Neither did the cocaine addiction that took him from his decadence in Los Angeles to the artistic rigor of his stay in Germany. Her fluid sexuality is discussed in general terms. The Bowie featured in the film is the man the artist chose to introduce to the world. Lunar Reverie is more of an experience than a story, and parts of Bowie’s story just didn’t quite fit.
Among the films inevitably presented in Lunar Reverie is The man who fell to earth, a thematically rich and dramatically inert 1976 science fiction film by Nicolas Roeg in which Bowie plays the extraterrestrial Thomas Jerome Newton, who visits our planet to procure valuable resources for his home planet. Instead, he makes millions on patents and is corrupted by the temptations of Earth, mostly TV (he watches six at a time), gin, and women. Ghostly pale with a mop of orange hair, worn down by the banality of the world, Newton is a quintessential Bowie creation, and an integral part of the man portrayed in Lunar Reveriea bit lost in a world that fiercely sticks to its conventions while idolizing its rule breakers.
Then there’s the music, a fierce assemblage of deep cuts and hits, studio remixes and concert gems. The soundtrack comes in at two hours and 20 minutes, and it deserves repeat listens. “I’m a DJ, I am what I play,” he says of “DJ,” a song that gets the remix treatment here. The song, from 1979 Tenant album, is actually a dismantling of DJ culture, but in its own way it speaks for Bowie. “My job is not me,” he says in the film, but Bowie’s music goes a long way in capturing the multitudes within.
In this direction, Lunar Reverie is a portrait of a slippery chameleon, slipping in and out of those aforementioned wardrobes and characters. Looking for some serious glam rock? Try some Ziggy Stardust. Ambient noise? Immerse yourself in the Berlin trilogy. He served delicious R&B with the Young Americans album and took a conscious turn into the Top 40 with let’s dance (the film features a live killer interpretation of the title song, during which he moves like a demon and holds several thousand fans in the palm of his hand). Towards the end of his life, he even satisfied his appetite for jazz on Black Starreleased two days before his death in January 2016.
To look at Lunar Reverie is to take this journey straight, no hunter. Same Cobain: Editing HeckMorgen’s 2015 adventurous portrayal of the late Nirvana leader, used talking heads to guide the viewer from station to station. Lunar Reverie, on the other hand, is its own narrator, its own track record, and its own DJ. For all his considerable technique, Morgen pulls off a filmmaker’s greatest magic trick. As Bowie enters the multicolored scene, the filmmaker disappears.
Chris Vognar is a cultural writer living in Houston.