“David Byrne’s American Utopia” is a soul-enriching experience, closing the impossible distance between the filmed stage and the viewer. This captures a live and urgent performance from the Broadway stage modified with additional tracks that frame the enduring legacy and immortal quality of Byrne’s incredible music.
Spike Lee directs an incredibly rich, cinematic undertaking with an atmosphere loaded with visual iconography. Lee’s command of composition, light and sparing, but explosive multimedia integration is something to behold. Byrne’s choice to deploy his most significant hits through American Utopia’s live performance is framed through his artistic evolution and activism. Byrne is a rebel, wielding his artistic powers to break down barriers between people with elemental reactions to music.
The performance space is a rigid square on a stage, boxed in by flowing chains. It creates a static quality, like the live audience and we the audience viewing it are staring into a boxy television set. The chains are such a practical and yet divine choice – they’re the shackles of American history, perception and the destiny of apathy. While in some scenes they are used as a proxy for some invisible barrier, Byrne and Lee’s genius is to have the performers frequently sweeping them aside. They make us feel like the chains of our unconscious cynicism, can be cast aside. This is a concert film that takes cues from “Dogville.” Byrne and Lee strip away decades of seasoning; only the vital organs remain.
The lighting too, on the band’s activities, transmutes the music and the underlying themes of Byrne’s state of the union’s potential. Performers auras come alive, we pour into giant eyes and the souls of those a part of the experience and are struck ice cold or set ablaze in line with what the track call for at the time.
Byrne and his merry band of eleven (Chris Giarmo, Tendayi Kuumba, Karl Mansfield, Angie Swan, Bobby Wooten III, Mauro Refosco, Tim Keiper, Gustavo Di Dalva, Jacquelene Acevedo, Daniel Freedman, Stephane San Juan) are dress in form-fitting, grey suits. Billy Connolly called suits “liars clothes,” and the formality is cheated by the performers’ bare feet. It’s a subtle rebellion.
The grey is versatile and when tactically used with light, thematically enhances every pulsing moment of the film. It’s all about the formation, the intimacy of the cameras – in any given moment of a given verse or song the shapes recall iconic images from cinema.
Throbbing, lumbering walkings towards the front of stage recall Fritz Lang’s automaton populace in “Metropolis.” In march formation, the beautifully eclectic diverse band cheats the recollections of “Triumph of the Will” or satirical riffs “Starship Troopers.” In a simple tilt of the lights, the towering shadows cast by band members affect the baroque evangelical sermon that casts shadows like “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.” With Lee at the helm, none of this feels accidental.
You might fight back the urge to cry, but you will not be able to stop yourself from bopping the fuck along to the rhythm of possibility. In one of the brief interactions with audience Byrne says something like “it’s you and us, and that’s what the show is.” By the show’s conclusion, Byrne and band have figuratively blown through the barriers between the stage and their audience.
It feels like the thesis of the performance has become a reality – we’re in this together and the audience at the show, the musicians, Byrne and we – the audience at home – are in orgiastic synchronicity. It feels sacrilegious even to breathe the transcendence of this work when the incredible Jonathan Demme directed “Stop Making Sense,” which is THE Talking Heads concert film that Pauline Kael once described as “close to perfection”. Lee joining Demme this close to perfection; makes sense.
