'David Bowie Is' Is An Odd Title And An Even Odder Film

The exhibit with the ungainly title, David Bowie Is got rave reviews when it opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London last year. Today, it opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. That will be the only place you can see it in the U.S. But a new documentary, also called David Bowie Is, opened tonight at select theaters around the country. Soundcheck's John Schaefer -- a longtime diehard Bowie megafan -- watched the film and has this review. If you want more of him geeking out about Bowie, be sure to check out his recent conversation with author and philosopher Simon Critchley.

Let me be clear about this: the documentary is not about David Bowie, per se. It’s about the museum exhibit.

So I went in thinking, "Really? You’re going to make a movie about a museum exhibit? How’s that gonna work?" The answer is, not so well. On the one hand, the exhibit looks amazing. And with all the film and video that Bowie has done over the years, the exhibition’s got lots of motion for something we think of as being very static. Plenty of the film’s best moments come from that treasure trove, including an early version of his hit “Space Oddity” that is not unknown to Bowie fans but which is still nice to see and hear.

But a documentary and a museum exhibit are an uncomfortable fit, and the directors have tried mightily to wrap one around the other with decidedly mixed results. We get lots of bits of museum-goers talking about their Bowie moments, including that famous night in 1972 when Bowie appeared on the hit British TV show Top of the Pops.

We also get whole speeches from an event at the V&A Museum in London, including five minutes of heavily-accented English from the Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto, which bring the proceedings to a screeching halt. And about 20 minutes in, I’d already lost track of how many times the word “iconic” had been used.

To give them credit, though, the filmmakers did come up with some really nice moments. They got Jonathan Barnbrook to talk about the process behind the creation of the cover art for Bowie’s surprise album from last year, The Next Day. That was pretty good. Even better was Bowie’s series of storyboard drawings for a proposed Diamond Dogs movie, which were then animated to give a sense of something Bowie wasn’t able to pull off. And of course, the film does allow you to see things that you wouldn’t otherwise see unless you go to Chicago. Like Bowie’s childhood photo of Little Richard, who apparently was a formative influence.

The film David Bowie Is seems like it might be aimed at Bowie obsessives, but those are exactly the people who will bitch and moan when they start talking about the 1995 album Outside while the background music comes from Ziggy Stardust; or who will notice that we’ve now seen the same set of handwritten lyrics three times.

So yes, I’m bitching and moaning. But I also sat through the whole thing, and it made me really want to go see the exhibit for myself, without the curators telling me what to look at and when. So to that extent, job done.

David Bowie Is is at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art through Jan. 4.