“David Byrne’s American Utopia” premiered on HBO this past Saturday and is now available on HBO Max.
Posted on 09.22.20:
I am hooked on Spike Lee’s concert documentary “American Utopia.” The film hasn’t even come out yet and I’ve already seen it three times. And I’m not even a big fan of David Byrne or his former band The Talking Heads. Maybe it’s because we live in such tumultuous times, where our spirits need to be lifted by art, music, visual content etc. It’s been a rough year, to say the least, and “David Byrne’s American Utopia” is being released at the perfect time.
As seen in the new trailer for Spike Lee’s concert film, this is a visual memento of the acclaimed Broadway show by Byrne, the former frontman of The Talking Heads, who is well known as one of the great stage performers of his era. In ‘American Utopia,’ recorded during its run at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre in New York City, Byrne is joined by an ensemble of 11 musicians, singers, and dancers from around the world, performing a mixture of classics and new songs. Lee shoots the whole thing in such inventively exciting ways. It’s easily Lee’s best movie of 2020 (yes, this is a knock on his overpraised “Da 5 Bloods.”)
Byrne is no stranger to cinematic adaptations of his stage performances. Jonathan Demme directed the indisputably great Talking Heads doc “Stop Making Sense,” which is one of the greatest concert movies of all-time - a groundbreaking blend of the visual and the musical. Will “American Utopia” be as highly regarded as that film in the years to come? Quite possibly.
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.