STEVENSON: ‘Moonage Daydream’ an immersive David Bowie documentary

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Moonage Daydream, which screened at TIFF before its Sept. 16 opening in IMAX theatres, is not a conventional rock star bio-pic, but then David Bowie wasn’t a conventional rock star.

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Instead, director Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture, Crossfire Hurricane, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) gives us a non-linear, intense, kaleidoscope of a film that shines nearly 2 1/2 hours of beautiful light on the artist, his art and spirituality, and what pushed him to constantly challenge himself.

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Major hint: Bowie’s older half-brother, Terry, was a major early music and book-reading influence before he ended up an institutionalized schizophrenic and the singer feared he might end up with a similar fate.

Bowie’s own life-long artistic journey, which ended with his death from cancer in January 2016, saw him study mime, write (both songs and a musical, Lazarus, which I saw two weeks before his death off-Broadway), record, sing, dance, act (in films, TV and on Broadway in The Elephant Man), paint and sculpt.

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Frankly, after watching the film, you feel like a bit of a lazy sod, he was so productive.

Luckily for Morgen, who met Bowie in 2007 in a meeting that went nowhere until his business manager reached out nine years later, was given access for the first time to 5 million items, including unseen paintings, drawings, recordings, photographs, films, journals, and performance clips from the Bowie estate.

Then life intervened.

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“In 2017, right when I was about to start my deep dive into Bowie’s media, I had a heart attack,” Morgen told the Guardian.

“I flatlined for a brief while and was in a coma for a week. It was from that position that I began to go through all of his media and so his musings on mortality, on ageing, his way that he approached life, proved to be quite nurturing, cathartic and inspiring for me.”

Moonage Daydream, named after a Bowie song, is made even more immersive by the fact that Bowie also narrates the entire film — with past interviews and recordings — so we hear from his perspective about his emotionally distant, non-affectionate parents, his constant travelling around the world, and how that led to him to find true love later in life with model Iman at age 45. (The couple have a daughter, Alexandria, known as Lexi, now, 22, and Bowie also has a son, Duncan Jones, 31, a successful filmmaker, from his first marriage to Angie).

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“I did not expect to discover that (Bowie) would provide a kind of road map to how to lead a more balanced and satisfying and fulfilling life,” Morgen, a married father of three, told Yahoo! Entertainment.

“His lines [in the film] about how you don’t really appreciate life until you’ve lived more days than you have in front of you — these lines were really, really moving.”

Fascinating and inspiring, Moonage Daydream is a film I think Bowie would have loved.