In a poetic piece made for the BBC in 1998 about the work of British artist Richard Devereux, David Bowie confronted “a deep and formidable mystery: I’m dying. You’re dying. Second by second, all is transient. Does it matter?” Those words circle around Moonage Daydream, threading in and out of Brett Morgen’s unfolding screen elegy. They bookend Morgen’s maximalist collage of Bowie’s life, work and thoughts – from disposable glam-pop culture to timeless matters of life and death via a kaleidoscopic montage of music, mime, painting, acting, animation and dance, all filtered through a cosmic wardrobe of ever-changing clothes, hair and teeth.
“He’s smashing!” burbles a 1970s Ziggy fan, one of many who have waited tearfully at a stage door to catch a glimpse of their idol. On stage, Bowie performs All the Young Dudes and Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud while cameras peer lasciviously up his silk-printed, polo-necked minidress. “Everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful,” says Bowie, another of the endlessly quotable found fragments that are the closest the film comes to narration. A little later, we hear of his “hotch-potch philosophy – I was a Buddhist on Tuesday and I was into Nietzsche by Friday”.
