Review: David Byrne's American Utopia (2020)

David Byrne’s American Utopia is a concert film, directed by Spike Lee, created by two artists who mean a great deal to me. It is a filmed version of the new stage production by the former Talking Heads lead singer. Appropriately, as the title suggests, Byrne himself is the central attraction. Presenting a mix of hits from his former band, solo pieces, and covers, the film is interwoven with Bryne’s asides, addressing the politically fraught state of contemporary America. The other notable element of the production is the 11 dancers and musicians on stage with Byrne, all in identical grey suits and barefeet, playing the show live with wireless instruments. The diverse group of musicians and the hopeful appeal of both Byrne’s banter is meant, as the title suggests, to point toward a vision of a better America. While the music is strong and the intentions noble, it’s hard for me to come away from American Utopia not feeling slightly underwhelmed, as both the political messaging and the performances fall short of the promise the collaboration of Byrne and Lee would suggest.

Byrne is a consummate artist, and his songwriting is so strong that, especially when he leans on his past hits, one can’t help but find the musical element engaging; I will never not love any version of “Once in a Lifetime:” its urgent exclamation of “How did I get here?” when confronting the dissonance between one’s expectations and the accumulations of life experience resonates deeply. But that is precisely the dissonance that I experienced in watching American Utopia, especially when contrasted with the classic 1984 Talking Heads concert film directed by Jonathan Demme, Stop Making Sense. American Utopia is the work of an artist presenting the wisdom of years, while the early Byrne was still a searcher. Maybe that film couldn’t be replicated by Byrne at this point in his life. Stop Making Sense was strange and wondrous, not in the manner of a Broadway stage production, but of a musical act pushing the limit of what rock music could be and a filmmaker doing his damndest to capture it. American Utopia strips away the discomfort and in the process loses something. Some of this might be that Talking Heads was more than just Byrne, but I suspect there’s something more to it that’s harder to articulate without sounding like a grouch.

There’s perhaps no better example with which to try to do so than in comparing the two performances of what might be Talking Heads’ and Byrne’s masterpiece, “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” In the original, the lyrics’ plaintive longing for connection in our brief lifetimes delivers an existential jolt. When Byrne in that show cries, “Love me till my heart stops, love me till I’m dead,” it’s a desperate appeal for love, noting the briefness of our lives and how contingent everything that we experience as life is (“Did I find you or you find me? / There was a time before we were born”). In the new film, it’s framed as an appeal to connection, but one that is meant to bring together a fractured American nation. It becomes too rooted in the moment, making the appeal of the song more narrow rather than opening the audience up to greater experiences and contemplation.

While Donald Trump’s name is never mentioned, it’s clear that American Utopia is meant to offer a balm to an American audience tired of the divisions and negativity that have characterized recent history. When Byrne sings “Everybody’s Coming to My House” from his American Utopia album, it’s an appeal to belonging and compassion. Byrne himself was an immigrant to America and it’s clear he believes in the possibility that the nation represents its greatest ideals, though his experience as a child coming from Scotland must certainly be different from someone coming as a refugee from Latin America or the Middle East today. What does come through is Byrne’s heart for people, and one cannot fault him for that. Not every avant-garde pop legend is as humanistic and earnest as Byrne appears to be.

But there’s also a sense in which Byrne has lost some of his avant-garde nature. In this show he’s no longer pushing people to think beyond, but rather explicitly making an appeal to a relatively straightforward political ethos of democratic liberalism and diversity. I don’t think these are bad things per se, but one can’t help but wonder if it’s enough to actually counter the forces that are arrayed against people these days.

The show wants to be as weird and intellectual as Talking Heads were in the 80s, but either we’ve all just incorporated that weirdness all into our culture for consumption (capitalism seems able to take everything, even critique, into itself) or Byrne himself has become more conventional. Take for instance the choreography and stage production: it’s no longer jarring or abstract in the way that watching the avant-garde dancing of someone like Piña Bausch is. Byrne isn’t shaking seemingly uncontrollably this time. Piña’s elaborate and carefully orchestrated strangeness revealed the possibilities of how the human body could move and still be dancing to music. The choreography here is more akin to the Broadway version of The Lion King, its affectations more about playing to expectations of the audience than challenging them. It’s the physical version of the comparison I made earlier between the 1980s version of “This Must Be the Place” and the one in this show.

I don’t think I’m too off topic in highlighting a comparison to German avant-garde art. In a pointed reference to rising fascism and the role of art, Byrne recounts the story of Dadaists like Max Ernst and Hugo Ball and the role of Dada art in confronting an audience with bizarre and shocking material. Ball’s poetry became the source of the lyrics of Talking Heads’ “I Zimbra,” which Byrne then performs. It’s a nice moment in the film, as reviving Dadaism in the 1980s during the Reagan era was a cry against the conformity of that era’s conservatism. But what does one do in an era today when seemingly everything doesn’t make sense?

One of the film’s best moments is when Byrne introduces “Born Under Punches,” by having each musician on stage with him join the song one instrument at a time. It reminds us of the actual artists sharing the stage with him and is one of the most genuine demonstrations of solidarity in the film. Likewise, because Spike Lee directed the film, the use of his trademark front-facing confrontational framing during a cover of Janelle Monae’s “What You Talmbout?,” presenting the names and faces of the victims of police violence, feels at least earned.

But on the whole, while the music is good, in the context of the present moment, it feels like it could have been more daring, more of a vision of a utopia that contrasts with the current dystopia we seem to be living in. While Stop Making Sense challenged its audience and freed them from the assumptions of their historical moment toward the end of the Cold War, American Utopia confirms most of its audience’s assumptions. Rather than shake our existential foundations, the utopia that the film proclaims seems strangely familiar. 

At the end of Stop Making Sense, during “Crosseyed and Painless,” Byrne sang “Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late […] Facts don't do what I want them to do / Facts just twist the truth around.” It was an expression of alienation from the dominant narratives of the era. I somehow can’t imagine that song fitting into this concert film, even if that alienation is felt by many more acutely than ever.

6 out of 10

David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020, USA)

Directed by Spike Lee; written by and starring David Byrne.

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