davidehrlich’s review published on Letterboxd:
Even in an era when rock shows were all about orgiastic excess, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne made a warm and inviting spectacle out of his own smallness. The signature image from Jonathan Demme’s totemic concert documentary “Stop Making Sense” finds Byrne getting lost inside his own comically large silver business suit; maybe it was a Kabuki-like expression of a man being swallowed alive by runaway capitalism, or maybe — as Byrne maintains — he just wanted to make it look like his head had shrunken down to a funny size.
Not that it was ever big to begin with. As radical in his humility as he was humble in his radicality, art rock’s very own Mr. Rogers welcomed us into his neighborhood by singing about the building that he wanted to live in and pointing out the highway that would lead us there; he bent the confusion of being alive into an olive branch and mapped out how our race to the future left us speeding along on a road to nowhere. “Stop Making Sense” was like a “Koyaanisqatsi” you could dance to, and it’s star was just as lost as we were, the only difference being that he could find the rhythm in a world that felt like it was spinning off its axis (when Byrne “tripped” over the drum fill at the end of “Psycho Killer” it almost felt like the music was playing him).
That was in 1984, a year that became synonymous with dystopia long before it began. Cut to: 2020, a year that became synonymous with dystopia as soon as it started, and might be straight up post-apocalyptic by the time it’s over. And you may ask yourself: “How did I get here?” But that was always a rhetorical question, and Byrne watched the last several decades play out on TV like the rest of us. Now, on the eve of an election that has a queasily climactic feel to it, he’s back on our screens with another concert film: A softer, wiser, and yet far more action-able sequel to “Stop Making Sense” that resolves into one of the best movies of its kind that anyone has made in the 36 years since.
If “Stop Making Sense” was a polite request to slow down, “American Utopia” is a desperate plea to change course. So much is the same as it ever was — some of the songs literally remain the same — but where one film wondered where we were going, the other confronts the fact that we’ll never get there on our current path. In his own sweet and quakingly sincere way, Byrne implores us to it that we’re lost, to ask for directions, and to steer toward the country we were promised with both hands on the wheel before it’s too late. If a word like “Utopia” can mean “good place” and “no place” at the same time, a word like “America” can too.