MODERN UTOPIA

REVIEW

MODERN UTOPIA

David Byrne continues to change the form of the concert film in a new documentary of his Broadway show

BY NATHAN WEINBENDER

1984’s Stop Making Sense begins with Talking Heads ish sense of humor who’s playing around with form. In frontman David Byrne walking out onto the stage this new film, he’s a cultural institution, a living monuwith nothing but an acoustic guitar and a boombox. ment to the New York post-punk scene he helped estabHe hits play and performs a jittery, stripped-down version lish, and yet he’s still finding new ways to top himself. of “Psycho Killer,” before being joined by bassist Tina The show is set on a sparse stage — there’s no Weymouth for a spare duet of “Heaven.” Then drummer equipment or elaborate decoration, merely a chainmailChris Frantz comes out, then keyboardist and guitar- like curtain around the perimeter that performers will ist Jerry Harrison, and then the backup singers and the occasionally disappear through. Byrne and his 11-person auxiliary percussionists, and by the fifth backing band, barefoot and adorned or sixth song, the stage is overflowing with performers. AMERICAN UTOPIA in matching grey suits, wear marching band-style instruments so they can

Byrne envisioned Stop Making Sense Not Rated move around freely in drumline formaas something of a conceptual deconstruc- Directed by Spike Lee tions. They blaze through a 21-song set, tion of the moving parts that make a Streaming on HBO Max making detours through iconic Talking concert work, deliberately laying bare the Heads songs like “Once in a Lifetime” behind-the-scenes mechanisms that have to click together and “Burning Down the House.” There’s the occasional like cogs in a machine. He treats the rock concert as an chiaroscuro lighting cue or a strobe effect to emphasize interactive installation: It’s as much about the Talking changes in the music, but for the most part, this is a Heads’ songs as it is about movement, color, patterns and black-box experience. the sheer kinetic energy of its performers. The show is a perpetual motion machine: It’s never

American Utopia, the new HBO Max documentary of not doing something. The musicians always seem to be Byrne’s recent Broadway residency, continues this idea mutating into a new abstract shape, a single-cell organof rock concert as art piece, and in its best moments it’s ism that’s perpetually expanding and contracting. Byrne nearly as radical and as gripping as Stop Making Sense. is usually flanked by two backup singers who employ a This is high praise, since that earlier film, directed by the lithe, balletic choreography that often resembles interprelate Jonathan Demme, is arguably the greatest concert tive dance or particularly flowery ASL. The camera is film of them all. mostly at the eye level of the audience, but we sometimes

But Byrne, now in his late 60s, is in top form here, get angles looking down at the stage from above so we and watching American Utopia back-to-back with Stop Mak- can admire the complexity of their movements. You get a ing Sense, it’s interesting to see how his poise has changed. sense that the show itself was designed for the inevitable In the 1984 film, he’s an ambitious upstart with an imp- concert film that would be made of it.

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American Utopia was directed by Spike Lee, and it’s his second great achievement this year after his Netflix war film Da 5 Bloods. As Jonathan Demme did in Stop Making Sense, Lee captures the immediacy and electricity of live music, of being in this theater with these performers at this exact time. Byrne’s artistic vision is obviously at the forefront of the film, but Lee’s directorial hand becomes apparent in the film’s most remarkable performance, a cover of Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout.” The song, which takes the form of a funereal chant, addresses police brutality toward Black people, calling out the victims by name. Lee intercuts this footage with blown-up photos of the men and women addressed in the lyrics, his camera pushing in on their faces, and it’s one of the great achievements of his career.

The design of American Utopia itself — sleek, grey, minimalist, well-calibrated — reflects the robotic remove of Byrne’s lyrics, and the odd ways that he has always related to technology, romance, corporate culture and basic FOR MORE Find our list of notable live music documentaries at Inlander.com/music. social routines. And yet for all the meticulous control that went into it, American Utopia is hardly lifeless. It’s bursting with invention and energy and spontaneity and goodwill, and when Byrne talks about the importance of connection — about the connection between creativity and expression, the connection firing between the synapses in our brains, the connection between performer and audience — it’s not just a nifty thematic device. He really means it. n