“I loved Fats Domino but I didn’t know why, I didn’t understand what the lyrics were about, but I loved it,” he says. David Bowie at some point “Moon Dream”. Or something like this. What is the importance of absolute faith in literalness, linearity, “normality” in this documentary about Brett Morgan?

However, from this blind adoration to the faces of the girls in the audience, the red manes of the boys, the other girls crying that they didn’t see the “Thin White Duke” leave the backstage of the concert, and others whose faces glow because they took him hand starts a path that seeks God at every turn.

David Bowie is lying down. The raw liquid mass covers his face, creating a shape. The idol has just been born. He will break it down and rebuild it dozens of times, maybe thousands and millions, Bowie’s every moment was a confrontation with a concept of himself.

However, for each of his Apollonian figures, Dionysius digs and digs and digs, trying to find something less fleeting, or rather, giving meaning to the fleetingness of our existence. Some seem to find it even for a moment in Bowie, who himself is looking for him among occupations, intellectual, artistic, geographical, from New York to Berlin, Africa, Japan and back, between Buddha and Nietzsche.

Is almost philosophical what happens in a storm of images and sounds from outer space, from Bowie on stage, to sometimes awkward interviews and futuristic ladders, Frankenstein and Kubrick films, Metropolis, Pollock, the binary system. And that’s because among all these elements that Morgen seems to have arranged with great care on the screen, all individual values ​​combine to embrace the chaos, as Bowie would have liked.

You didn’t come here to study the history of David Bowie. At least not in the orthodox sense. No encyclopedic formulations, no desire to tell everything, no glorification of achievements. And yet the film worships him like a god, even at the moments when it unsettles him. You may know everything, you may not know anything about him, his essence is waiting here in every frame he wants to experience. turn watching a documentary into an experience.

And then David Jones sits on the couch. TV questions, how was your relationship with your mother, my father died, I don’t see her often, can you love someone from a distance.

And when, for a boy from London, a bit of an unraveling comes the 80s and then the 90s, we are approaching today at a speed that seems acquired. Bowie changed his skin several times, now he can calm down. Fills stadiums, finds love in Iman the narrative goes (perhaps longer than necessary) along with his life.

God is dead, people must themselves become gods (Nietzsche).

Bowie was “The Man Who Fell to Earth” before Nicholas Regg called him that. As long as he stays in it, he will be amazed by the appearance, and he is. He will seek God and find him within himself. And let it be enough to say goodbye to us from the stars and space, from where it came and returns, to the eternal womb of the world.

Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is in theaters distributed by Tulip.