I saw Moonage Daydream Sunday afternoon/evening on an Imax screen. And then I wrote what’s below. Narrative spoilers are kind of impossible with this movie, since it’s not a narrative (and to the extent that it is chronological, I assume we all know that David Bowie died). But if you want to see it without knowing too much about it, you might want to skip this post.

1. I found it neither as disappointing as some people have said, nor as consistently brilliant as some people have said. Rather, I thought it was uneven: dazzling and wonderful at moments; draggy and almost unpleasant to watch at others. But if I have to issue a binary verdict, I’d say it’s definitely worth seeing by any Bowie fan or by anyone who wants to understand why Bowie matters (even if the film’s argument about why Bowie matters might not match mine).
2. David Bowie was just an amazing performer and singer. No surprise there, and no surprise that I’m saying it. It does bear saying that he had an astonishingly gorgeous and varied voice. But also that he could make even an overplayed song like “Heroes” (yes, I said it; it’s a great song, but just too ubiquitous for its own good) deeply moving. The performance of that song in the movie made me sob at the sheer beauty of his singing, and the profundity of his performance.
3. For that reason and others, the best parts of the movie are no doubt the straightforward Bowie performances. And even though I’ve seen most of them before, it was a pleasure to see them on a huge screen. Even those from the Pennebaker documentary of the last Ziggy concert, which I’ve watched a dozen times but only the first time on a big screen. The fabulous sound quality (no doubt aided by Tony Visconti’s production) made it a pleasure to listen to as well as to watch.
4. Highlight performances include one that I don’t think has been shown before—the version of the Jean Genie/Love Me Do medley with Jeff Beck on guitar. And even though I’ve seen it in lots of versions, including live, his singing “Cracked Actor” to a skull is great every time. It’s probably the nastiest song Bowie ever wrote, performed from the perspective of a character even more unpleasant than the Thin White Duke, and serenading (and making out with) a skull makes it even nastier, and maybe it counteracts the character’s misogyny. A little. (It also resonated nicely with the clip with the skull from Blackstar, which comes much later in the movie). On a completely different note, the live performance of “Warszawa” is also stunning. That he opened big concerts with that piece—about as far from rock ‘n’ roll as he ever got—is astonishing. That I did not see that tour is one of the great regrets of my life.
5. I also liked some of the sections where the director overloaded our brains with rapid images and intense music. Sensory overload is basically this film’s aesthetic (don’t go if you have sensory issues), and some of those sequences are really well done. I’d include in that both performances of “Hello Spaceboy” (though I’m not at all sure we needed two), but also a much mellower song, “Memory of a Free Festival.”
6. Unexpectedly, the movie gives a lot of screen time to the mostly instrumental tracks on side two of “Low” and “Heroes,” and I liked that fact. Some of the visuals during those sequences were not so compelling, though.
7. Despite having two versions of “Hello Spaceboy,” showing a bit of the “Blackstar” video, and playing a snippet of “Lazarus,” the movie largely ignores Bowie’s late work. “Reality,” “Heathen,” and “The Next Day” don’t exist at all in the movie, I’m pretty sure. (Neither do “….hours…..” or “The Buddha of Suburbia;” nor do “Tonight” and “Never Let me Down;” nor do the years as a member of Tin Machine. The Young Americans album and the Sigma sessions barely figure. It’s obviously about what matters to the director, which at some level is fine, though all of those moments in Bowie’s career have their charms. Still, there was no way the movie was going to be complete; I understand that.
8. However, there were things that could have been cut to make room for other important things. Why were there long stretches focused on the back of Bowie’s head? Why does the movie spend so much time on his time in Asia without contextualizing or explaining it? Why are there several clips used multiple times? Did we really need to see so many of Bowie’s paintings (which I will say it was interesting to see, large, but are they the reason anyone goes to see a Bowie documentary)?
9. And the movie also didn’t have to give so much credit to the simplistic narrative in which “Let’s Dance” marked an artistic retreat for Bowie that he never recovered from. Yet the movie makes this explicit (and is able to find sound clips of Bowie saying this was so, though Bowie said other different things too). It’s a tiresome narrative and in my view it’s wrong. Every one of those albums has songs on it that any other artist would be proud to have produced. And some of the later albums are truly great. Ignoring them for the sake of narrative economy, I can see, maybe. But actively dismissing them is bad.
10. This despite the fact that the performance in the movie of “Let’s Dance,” I think, accentuated the darkness and weirdness of even Bowie’s poppiest tunes. He sings “Put on your red shoes and dance the blues” like he’s giving an order with a threat behind it. But I’ve always found the impression that “Let’s Dance” is a light tune to be unpersuasive. What does anyone who thinks this make of lines like ‘Let’s Dance/for fear your grace should fall/for fear tonight is all….” “Fear tonight is all?” That’s pretty scary stuff.
11. There are also long stretches in which music plays and semi-psychedelic colors and patterns fill the screen. There are moments when it works. I appreciated, for instance, the dots on the screen that call attention to George Murray’s amazing and wonderful bass line on “Sound and Vision.” But too often it just didn’t work for me I had the sense that others in the theatre liked those parts a lot, so emphasize the “for me.”
12. I love funny, clever, catty Bowie. [The reply to Russell Harty—“they’re shoe shoes, silly”—was just a brilliantly clever and hilarious deployment of queer campiness on national TV]. Brett Morgen is more into philosophical Bowie. As a friend of mine says, that both Bowies can coexist is a good thing. And don’t get me wrong: I take Bowie intellectually seriously, too. But let him talk too long and he sounds portentous. Brett Morgen thinks Bowie offers a guide the life in his statements. I find that guide more in his songs than in his pronouncements
13. Which is really the biggest problem with the movie. It sometimes makes Bowie into a pretentious bore. And maybe sometimes he was a pretentious bore. We probably all are, sometimes. But that’s not what I go to a Bowie documentary to see. Fortunately, throughout the movie, just as my attention started to flag, it would switch to a visually dynamic section with a focus on Bowie’s music and often a performance. So I was never bored for long at all.

I’m sure I’ll eventually come up with more than this list of thirteen, but it will do for now.