FILTER SCREEN
One Giant Leap
A flawed but fascinating portrait of David Bowie.
By Ben Thompson.
Hello spaceboy: scenes from Moonage Daydream, a film which can’t contain the complexities of David Bowie.
Moonage Daydream ★★★
Dir: Brett Morgen
UNIVERSAL. C/ST
THEHECROWDS surging out of Earl’s Court station on the way to see David Bowie in 1978 exhibit a level of collec- tive excitement that doesn’t so much border on lust as invade it and take its royal family hostage. In the heady aftermath of Peter Jack-son’s Get Back and Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground – films which in different ways afforded us the magical illusion that we were sharing their fabled subjects’ personal space in real time – it’s not unreasonable for an archival film portrait of a canonical rock figure to prompt similarly heightened expectations.