#American utopia album review movie

Spike Lee, who directed American Utopia, inherently understands this and allows the audience to view the onstage action from practically every spot in the theater: the front row the orchestra seats, where shadowy silhouettes of audience members bob into the camera’s line of sight the balconies and onstage, via close-up views of the performers, their mobile drum sets, and even their bare feet. What it can do is give you access to perspectives that a typical ticket-holder does not get.

#American utopia album review movie

If your mind has opened even a little by the time American Utopia is over, that is a testament to what publicly presented art can do and why its absence is so deeply felt right now.Ī movie of a concert or a play cannot replicate what it feels like to be there. Byrne jokingly suggests that all that shedding makes us stupider as we age, but by the end of the performance, he revises that perception and sees a potential bright side in it: Brains literally can and do change, even though the world keeps providing evidence to the contrary. “Our brains can change.” This is a reference to the beginning of the show, in which he holds a model of a human brain in his hands during the song “Here,” and later explains that infant minds are filled with neurological connections that they lose as they get older. “We’re not fixed,” says Byrne, dressed, like everyone onstage, in a gray suit more tailored and dignified than his famous Stop Making Sense giganto blazer. There’s hope in this performance, too, and that is particularly valuable to hear and feel in this moment. Even the themes in American Utopia, which runs a string through Byrne’s discography upon which it hangs multifaceted questions about America’s capacity to become a better nation, resonate more deeply than they may have as recently as eight months ago. Byrne’s perpetually focused energy and that of his kinetic musical accompanists and two expressive dancers, Tendayi Kuumba and Chris Giarno, act as a magnet, tugging your attention away from usual concerns - COVID-19, Supreme Court appointments, the fact that there are always so many damn dishes in the sink - and fixing it on their precise movement and the rousing music they generate. To the extent that film can, it reminds us how it feels to watch something vibrant and thought-provoking in a live venue, surrounded by people who are fully engaged in what they are seeing. The show had been due to return this fall, a plan shelved now that Broadway theaters will remain shuttered until June.īut in a way, even this American Utopia allows us to “leave our homes” in some sense. They’ve all been closed since the beginning of this pandemic, which caused theaters, among other places, to shut down less than a month after American Utopia ended its run at the Hudson. Even if we wanted to visit the Hudson Theatre, or any Broadway stage, we couldn’t. We haven’t left our homes to go and see this version of American Utopia. Now, as the stage show is transmitted to us via televisions, tablets, and cell phones, that innocuous statement becomes unintentionally ironic. When he said this during the show’s live run, which ran from October of 2019 to February of 2020, it was a sincere expression of gratitude for those who had spent their time and money to witness this dynamic performance of Byrne’s music, both from his American Utopia album and his broader career, including his years as frontman for the Talking Heads. David Byrne says this to an audience at the Hudson Theatre near the start of American Utopia, the filmed version of Byrne’s Broadway concert/musical that airs Saturday on HBO.