Metacritic reviews

Moonage Daydream, a wildly creative tribute to everything Bowie achieved over four and a half decades, sets a sky-high bar as cinematic fan-service, and it leaves you buzzing.

It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming.

At a lengthy 140 minutes, the film flashes by. The deeper you go the more you want to know, and the more there is to know.

Pruning would hamper the unencumbered risk-taking on display, which extends to some atmospheric animation (as it did with Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck), and instantly vaults the effort to the top of the Bowie docs. The music itself, gorgeously remixed by Bowie's longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti, has never sounded better or stranger, with isolations of instrumental passages that stick in mind.

Moonage Daydream is a bracing, gloriously messy (or, more likely, gloriously messy seeming) celebration and immersion in all things Bowie.

More sensory experience than straightforward recounting, the documentary by Brett Morgen (“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”) is about feeling your way through a chaotic world with Ziggy Stardust as your anchor.

The scope shrinks in the final third, as Morgen seemingly retreats into a more comfortable linear chronology — the last twenty years of his life blast past as quickly as his first — but whew, this is one helluva technicolor starship.

Unconventional, almost to a fault, Brett Morgen’s impressionistic, experiential Bowie documentary is an electrifying oddity.

Much of this film has never been seen before, and it is a true treasure trove. It feels, like Bowie’s career, though, incomplete, and certainly the period between his later-in-life marriage to Iman and death after the final, unsettling Blackstar recordings is vague and reliant on what the director/producer/editor calls ‘musical mash-ups’ which he designed and edited to have a trancey, hypnotic effect.

Moonage Daydream is short on insight, and ends up feeling more enervating than enlightening.