[imagesource: Universal Pictures]

To make a biopic of sorts about David Bowie, you have to be up to the challenge of capturing a shape-shifter.

If anyone has proven themselves capable of this, it would seem to be Brett Morgen, whose credits include 2015’s Cobain: Montage of Heck.

Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is essentially a maximalist collage of Bowie’s life, work, and thoughts, as they worm through the glam-pop, the sordid, the existential, and the downright zany.

The American director’s “kaleidoscopic collage of David Bowie’s life is a dazzling mashup of elegy, celebration and intimate portrait” writes The Guardian, which gave the “mind-blowing labour of love” five stars.

It’s less biopic and more a “cinematic odyssey” according to the official synopsis, using fragments of films that Bowie recycled in his songs and stage shows along with some rich archival material.

Catch a glimpse:

The film has been described as “broadly chronological” with a “fragmentary childhood backstory” slotted in at some point.

There is, however, enough intercutting, shuffling, and “musical mashups” to make it a real, heartfelt attempt at capturing Bowie’s extensive imagination:

Is it definitive? Of course not. No two-and-a-quarter hour film could ever hope to contain Bowie’s labyrinthine legacy, and despite the exhaustive mining of rich archival material (some familiar, some revelatory), there are still plenty of roads for future film-makers to follow.

What Moonage Daydream does manage to do is to share some of the adventurous spirit of its subject – a chameleon who wasn’t afraid of falling flat on his face while reaching for the stars. If Bowie’s career teaches us anything, it’s that no one can laugh at you if you’ve already laughed at yourself.

Overall, though, it is a “profound sense of love” that has allowed Moonage Daydream to score a stellar review.

You’re going to want to watch this one in a theatre or on a big screen. It was released worldwide on September 16.

[source:gurdian]