Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

in upstate New York. He doesn’t even get to
Manhattan as much as he used to by most accounts.
When he appears, it’s usually to walk a red carpet
for a charity event or a real occasion like the
premiere of his son’s film Moon at the 2009
Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. That film
stars indie mainstay Sam Rockwell and covers
familiar Bowie-ist territory: an astronaut experiencing
extreme loneliness during a space mission with
nothing but the voice of his onboard computer, Gerty
3000 (Kevin Spacey), to comfort him. “It started in
utero,” Duncan Jones told Rolling Stone, explaining
his penchant for existential sci-fi. The film’s pacing is
certainly a throwback to the auteur era of the late
sixties and seventies (including Kubrick’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey and Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to
Earth). Jones executes this with real confidence
whereas other first-time filmmakers, especially in the
Web-age, might be tempted to chuck out mood and
tone for the sake of rapid-fire imagery designed to
cheaply hold the attention of a Web surfer. The
machinations of corporate greed and bursts of Hal
Ashby–esque madcap humor (Rockwell vexing his
clone by dancing to “Walking on Sunshine” by
Katrina and the Waves) also ground it in the past (for
the better). That Jones waited until he was already
pushing forty when he decided to make his debut
seems in hindsight a wise choice. The film will surely
have a life beyond being the footnote in the larger
Bowie biography. The screening that I attended at
the Landmark Sunshine Cinemas on the Lower East