Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 92% based on 150 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's critics' consensus reads: "An audiovisual treat for Bowie fans, Moonage Daydream takes an appropriately distinctive approach to one of modern music's most mercurial artists." On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the film has a score of 83 out of 100 based on 34 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote that "We've seen trippy documentaries before, but Morgen seems to have created this movie to be rock 'n' roll. [...] Watching Moonage Daydream, there are essential facts you won't hear, and many touchstones that get skipped over (in the entire movie, you'll never even see an album cover). But you get closer than you expect to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was." Corey Seymour of Vogue commended the film's editing and soundtrack, and called the film "astounding, bombastic, groundbreaking, electrifying, and among the best films about any artist or musician I've ever seen. [...] Morgen has [assembled] a mesmerizing collage of sound and vision that will entrance and enrich any Bowie fan and, presumably, make new fans of anyone lucky enough to have this be their first real encounter with his world."
Peter Bradshaw, in his review of the film for The Guardian, gave it a score of five out of five stars. He called the film "a glorious celebratory montage", and wrote favourably of how the film "shows that his fans, especially the ecstatic young people at the Hammersmith Odeon and Earl's Court shows, were not different from Bowie: they became Bowie. Overwhelmed, transfigured, their faces looked like his face." Robert Daniels, writing for RogerEbert.com, praised the film's editing, and called it "a bombastic, overstimulating, poignant, life-affirming, and risk-taking summation of the artist's ethos and maturation as a person. In short, Moonage Daydream is the film Bowie would've proudly made." Fionnuala Halligan of Screen Daily called the film "a pristine sensory voyage, with astonishing sound", and lauded its presentation as "skilled and satisfyingly unconventional".
Entertainment Weekly's Joshua Rothkopf gave the film a grade of "A−", complimenting the remixed music by Tony Visconti and noting that, "Occasionally, Morgen's flow can feel belabored and imprecise, [...] But pruning would hamper the unencumbered risk-taking on display," an approach which Rothkopft writes "instantly vaults the effort to the top of the Bowie docs." Siddhant Adlakha of IndieWire gave the film a "B+", characterizing it thus: "More sensory experience than straightforward recounting, [Moonage Daydream] is about feeling your way through a chaotic world with Ziggy Stardust as your anchor." He concluded that, "As musical documentaries go, it's more ambitious than anything you're likely to witness for quite some time." Paul Sinclair of SuperDeluxeEdition was more critical in his review, praising the film's integration of archival footage, animation, interview audio, and music while criticizing the pacing and length, describing the result as "oddly unmoving" and stating that "the film is at least half an hour too long, a feeling accentuated by the reuse of clips you've already seen on a number of occasions which gives a rather circular, haven't-we-been-here-before vibe to proceedings." Sinclair also criticized a perceived lack of sufficient coverage for certain periods of Bowie's career, singling out his tenure on EMI America Records and his membership in Tin Machine.
