Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Moby Doc’ on Hulu, A Whale Of An Autobiographical Tale From The Musician And Activist

Moby Doc (Hulu) blends confessional navel-gazing, career retrospection, and flights of animated and illustration fancy to tell the personal and professional story of how Moby became a thing. And what has he become? He’s a guy who says “As I’ve gotten older, the world of people just doesn’t interest me as much” in a documentary he made about his own life. 

MOBY DOC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The veteran musician, animal rights activist, and famous vegan Moby is no stranger to offering up his life as grist for the mill of self-reflection. After all, he’s published two memoirs that gazed into his past, a place full of lasting trauma as the child of a broken home, his longing for a mother’s love, the sense of community he discovered in music, particularly punk rock, and the corrupting absurdism of stardom. Oh yeah, and there’s also the matter of whether or not he dated an eighteen-year-old Natalie Portman as a boozy musician in his thirties. The social media fallout from that last part got Moby and his 2019 book tour canceled, and he took some time to step back, record Brian Eno-indebted ambient records, and continue his focus on vegan activism. But with a new album out — Reprise offers career highlights in orchestral and acoustic form — Moby is once again looking back on where he came from, how it all happened, and where it fell apart. Enter the world of Richard Melville Hall’s Moby Doc.

Perhaps it’s because he’s publicly revisited the material of his life before that Moby and director Rob Gordon Bralver chose a freeform style for Moby Doc, one full of manipulated film, stretches of abstraction, mouse puppetry, animation, illustration, and even a segment with the winking title card “The Childhood Trauma Re-Enactment Players.” This hodgepodge of mediums hangs together on bursts of narration from Moby — “If I figure out my perfect existential portofolio, then I’ll find perfect human happiness,” something he says he tried and failed at — and a wealth of musical selections, everything from vintage alt-90s MTV rave splatter and stadium-sized electronic music bombast to Moby performing the heavy-hitters from 1999’s Play with a live orchestra and female vocalists. David Lynch also drops by occasionally to say things like “the suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity dissolving and pure gold coming from within.” Ultimately, Moby Doc probes the weight of psychic damage — of personal histories broken, of the fleeting satisfaction of performing, of the poisonous mental cocktail of addiction and celebrity. As he cycles through career hustle and sudden fame to worldwide adulation, descent into substance abuse oblivion, and recalibration to activism and clean living, Moby’s latest look into his life finds him equal parts bemused, self-effacing, and racked with narcissism, someone who feels free to pet a cow or engage the Grim Reaper in polite conversation.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? David Bowie, who Moby calls his favorite musician ever and who he eventually came to know and collaborate with, was the subject of one of the more extreme examples of excess and addiction vis-a-vis music-making in the 1974 BBC Television doc Cracked Actor. And for another look at the arc of art, performance, sudden celebrity, mental spazzing, and visual experimentation, there’s Meeting People Is Easy, Grant Gee’s Grammy-nominated 1998 doc about Radiohead in the era of OK Computer.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s a lot of Moby going on here — Moby relaxing at home, Moby talking on the phone, Moby pontificating on stage, and Moby appearing in archival VHS with long hair and horn-rimmed glasses. But when his pals and collaborators do get a word in edgewise, they prove to be pretty engaging. There is Lynch, of course, but also musician (Moby significant other) Julie Mintz pulling double-duty as performer and player in a sketch about celebrity therapy, and the artist and illustrator Gary Baseman, who is an engaging lunch companion.

Memorable Dialogue: “The animal is almost like an emissary of the vast existential void that we’re all so afraid of.” You see, it’s not just about the environmental stress of animal agriculture, or the tally of health problems related to the consumption of meat. For Moby, everything, even the docile gaze of the buffalo, is really about existential horror.

Sex and Skin: Moby’s mentions of his dalliances with strippers during his days of rock star excess are accompanied by quick cuts of salacious footage — women in lingerie, come-hither stares. An illustration depicts him in bed with a naked companion.

Our Take: “I thought Play was gonna be a complete failure, you know, because it was a weird, badly-mixed, badly-produced record that I made in my bedroom, mainly involving vocals from people who’d been dead for forty or fifty years. But then things changed a lot.” That’s how Moby summarizes his experience with the fin de siècle album that would go on to set boffo sales figures and become a key example of the now-steady slipstream between music licensing and advertising. And it’s typical of the tone he strikes throughout Moby Doc, where the musician and activist ruminates over his successes and failures with the same gloss of grimacing hindsight mixed with artful whimsy. Some factoids about the creation of Play, or how its marketing was deployed, would be of value. But Moby Doc only presents that chapter through the prism of its subject’s memory banks, and moves on to depict another stretch of his life, the 2000s caterwaul of excess and entitlement that Moby says “completely corrupted and ruined me” but that was also pretty great. He’s happy to take his lumps alongside the acknowledgements of his success — in one sequence, Moby appears in stocks as haters hurl rotten vegetables and chant “Techno sucks!” — but that success, to the Moby of this doc anyway, seems to manifest in ways both physical and ephemeral. The film’s winking animated visuals and self-deprecating humor are therefore part of this version of events.

Because of its construction and how it leans so heavy on the abstract, Moby Doc rarely engages directly with live performance. There are snatches instead, here a solemn, hymn-like take on “Natural Blues,” there the singer accompanying himself on acoustic guitar for “Porcelain,” which becomes an elegy to his deceased mom. But it still contains a boatload of music, and even culminates in a shambolic run through the Wayne Coyne collabo “Perfect Life” with the man himself and a troupe of gonzo merry-makers. Moby has by now made memoir another chapter in his career. But Moby Doc is probably the best this permutation of his persona has ever looked.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Moby has always been a pretty cerebral cat, and Moby Doc is no different, happily breaking the frame of traditional music documentary form to free-associate with his life and legacy.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges