American Utopia

18 Dec 2020 If you ever wanted to walk around in the brain of the tireless polymath and comfortably odd performer David Byrne, you would do well to watch American Utopia.  Byrne has previously brought his powerful tenor and angular frame to the screen in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert movie Stop Making Sense. Directed by Spike Lee, whose fiction work often contains a sublime marriage of image and music, American Utopia carries that same fiercely kinetic and ebullient energy (there’s even a lamp cameo), but gone are the spaghetti arms and gargantuan suit, replaced with an openly personal and political positioning of Byrne’s music.