What is happening here is that Morgen is painting, in broad strokes, the kind of artistic arc that every Western intellectual is said to have followed in the postwar 20th century West. It’s a familiar, if tired, story. The journey began with the Beatniks, then went through the Beatles, got lost somewhere in the 1970s and emerged sober and re-energized after punk. The defiant stance is essential: down with the bourgeois life left behind, forward with dismantling the old ideas about gender, family, home, capitalism and society.

Yet in Bowie’s case, this might be an exaggeration to the point of a lie. Of course Bowie was an avant-garde artist and a brilliant musician. He was the epitome of cool. Yet the singer, painter, and actor also harbored suspicions of revolutionary movements and was deeply influenced by the books he read—books that were often classics of Western literature. An international superstar who lived globally, Bowie was formed by Western culture. …

How fascinating, penetrating, and wonderful “Moorage Daydream” might have been had Brett Morgen slowed down and taken the time to examine the books that made Bowie Bowie.