By now, we all are so familiar with the structure of the music bio-documentary that when we watch one, we know what to expect: the hard-scrabble beginnings, the rise to fame, the pressure of being at the top, the crushing fall, the victorious comeback. VH1’s “Behind the Music” trained us so well.
And that’s precisely what Brett Morgen wanted to avoid when he set out to make a film about David Bowie. “Moonage Daydream,” which premiered in May at the Cannes film festival and showed again at the Toronto fest earlier this week, is a work of nonfiction centered on Bowie, but it’s hardly a traditional tour through the Thin White Duke’s life.