Sound plus vision

“Moonage Daydream” is ideally seen on the biggest screen with the loudest speakers. Morgen says he thinks this is one of the first films whose original format was 12.0 audio, designed for IMAX theaters and Atmos audio systems.

Sound mixer Paul Massey, an Oscar winner for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” also mixed it to match the size and shape of any theater where it might screen, Morgen says. And Massey and Bowie’s longtime friend and producer Tony Visconti also remixed the songs used in the film to maximize their impact in cinemas.

“If you’re paying money to go see this movie in a movie theater, it should be for an experience,” Morgen says. “You should be hearing Bowie’s music in a way that you can’t hear it at home. And hopefully, that’s achieved.”

While the music is spectacular — only recordings with the best source of audio were used — the visuals are equally creative.

There are interviews Bowie did on camera over his life — the singer is used as the only narrator in the film — as well as rare concert footage, music videos, and films Bowie made as he traveled the world on various projects.

At times, as the music plays, things get abstract onscreen. A clip from the old blackand-white “Nosferatu” appears, soon followed by early filmmaker Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon” and then Bowie’s “Blackstar” video, one of the last he made before his death.

“David was a culture vulture, and he was my cultural passport to the world,” Morgen says. “Through Bowie, I was introduced to William Burroughs and Bertolt Brecht and things that weren’t being taught in eighth grade.

“He would make a vague reference to something which I didn’t know and then I would go look it up,” he says of both his adolescence and the filmmaking here. “I started putting together a list of anytime David mentioned a source of inspiration.

“Every clip, every photograph, every reference is something that inspired David throughout his life,” Morgen says. “The hope was that the film would be a Bowie experience, so it would invite the audience to project onto the screen, to fill in the blanks.

“If you’re a deep Bowie fan then you know what he was doing during the moments that I’m not talking about. And if you’re a casual fan, you don’t know about Iggy Pop, so you’re not going, ‘Where’s Iggy?’ ”