Stream It Or Skip It: ‘David Byrne’s American Utopia’ On HBO, A Spike Lee-Directed Film Of Byrne’s Broadway Show

Directed by Spike Lee, David Byrne’s American Utopia is a filmed version of Byrne’s Broadway show of the same name, which played the Hudson Theatre from September 2019 until all of Broadway was closed down last February due to the pandemic. If you think it’s going to be a straightforward concert film, then you don’t know Byrne very well. But you will after watching this film.

DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Byrne starts the show on stage alone, sitting at a small table looking at a model of the human brain. It’s a prop for the last song on 2018’s American Utopia album, “Here,” discussing the parts of the brain humans use and don’t use — don’t worry, it’s not a pedantic song in the least.

As the song goes along, we start to see the members of Byrne’s backing ban come out on the plain, silver-curtain-ringed stage. What’s unique about the 11-member band, other than the fact that they come from all over the world (two are even from New Jersey!), is that all of their instruments, whether it’s guitars or drums, are portable and wireless. This allows Byrne and his band to move, all clad in grey suits and barefoot, to move around the stage at will, either dancing along with Byrne’s signature robotic dance moves or to have choreographed routines of their own, via choreographer Annie-B Parson.

Byrne does talk to the audience after every few songs, talking about things like the fact that we loose neural connections in our brain as we get older, but somehow manage to connect with others. He also mentions that humans love looking at other humans, and he discusses how a church choir in Detroit made his song “Everybody’s Coming To My House” sound more joyous than he ever could. He also talks about how voter turnout, especially in local elections, is painfully low, despite the fact that those elections directly affect people’s lives.

Most of the songs are from the American Utopia album, but Byrne also adds enthusiastic interpretations of songs from his solo catalogue, as well as two massive his from his former band, Talking Heads: “Once In A Lifetime” and “Burning Down The House”. One of the last songs he sings isn’t even his, it’s Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” which calls out victims of police brutality and institutionalized racism going all the way back to Emmet Till. During the song, Lee cuts away to shots of the people who have been called out (sometimes with relatives holding the pictures), and then adds three victims who came after the show was shot: Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Byrne has been making concert films in his avant-garde style for decades now. So it’s not a stretch to say that American Utopia is just a more mature version of Stop Making Sense.

Performance Worth Watching: While Byrne is in good voice at 67 (at the time of filming) and jumps around the stage with the same herky-jerky energy that he had in the ’70s and ’80s, the musicianship of his band is what we were fascinated with. When he introduces each member, they start playing their part of the next song just to prove that all the music is live. They’re able to lug their instruments around the stage, keeping their choreography in mind while staying in tune and on tempo to create this transcendent live music experience. It takes a second to contemplate all they have to do, but once we did, we found what they were doing to be remarkable.

Memorable Dialogue: It’s not as much dialogue, but the joyousness in both the band and the crowd when Byrne leads the band through the audience during the closing song, “Road To Nowhere.” Byrne can sometimes seem emotionless when he’s singing, but we could tell that even he was feeding off the energy of the enthusiastic audience, who knew his catalogue well.

Our Take: I wanted to review David Byrne’s American Utopia from the perspective of a Byrne admirer who wasn’t an obsessive fan who knew his whole catalogue. Could the show keep me interested for its entire 105-minute runtime? For the most part, it did, thanks to Byrne’s enthusiastic performance, the amazing performance by his backing band, and Lee’s expert direction.

It’s not easy to capture a live stage show and make viewers feel like they’re in the venue, or even better, seeing things that the live audience isn’t. Lee, who is no stranger to the concert documentary format, covers a lot of bases, with cameras above the stage, behind the stage, and in the audience. The last one is important because, when he cuts to an audience view of the stage, with people standing and dancing, it showed the energy in the room that was not only generated by Byrne and his band, but also feeding back to them and getting them even more pumped up.

Byrne’s renditions of familiar hits like “Once In A Lifetime” and “Burning Down The House” were fresh while keeping them familiar, and both tied into the show’s theme of connection.

Are there parts of the show that dragged a bit? Sure. If you’re not a huge fan of Byrne’s, you can only take so much of his quirky “Dad doing the robot” style of dancing. But it’s not like he didn’t careen from one upbeat song to the next, often hardly taking a beat before moving on. And seeing the band moving around the stage made the show a visual as well as a musical feast, which as we explained above is no small feat.

The part of the film that stirred me the most is the part that showed Lee’s influence the strongest, when he flashed to pictures of the people mentioned in “Hell You Talmbout.” The effort Lee took to track the relatives down and get them to film their brief scenes gave the song even more impact, and it was a good way to shake things up near the end of the film.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Whether you’re a David Byrne fan or not, David Byrne’s American Utopia shows two artists — Byrne and Lee — who can take the standard concert film and make it into something different and special.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream David Byrne's American Utopia On HBO Max