Spike Lee and David Byrne’s American Utopia

Few critics have been able to resist measuring American Utopia up against Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert movie that captured the Byrne-led Talking Heads at their exuberant peak. The band had emerged from a crowded club scene in New York in the late 1970s, driven by Byrne’s idiosyncratic persona, an art nerd simultaneously intrigued, enthralled, and maybe a bit frightened, too, by what the beats laid down by drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth were doing to his rail-thin body. Byrne is sixty-eight now, a little filled out, a white-haired Oscar and Grammy winner, and his new show has sprung from his 2018 album American Utopia, itself part of a larger multimedia project, Reasons to Be Cheerful.

In the film, upbeat versions of selections from the album are interspersed with such Heads-era hits as “Burning Down the House,” a real barnstormer in Stop Making Sense. But American Utopia “has its own celebratory, eccentric identity,” finds Dowd. “It’s more relaxed, maybe more intimate and inviting.” Byrne’s new band, “a multi-national eleven-piece decked out in identical gray suits, works its way across the space with movements that somehow feel both spontaneous and synchronized.” For Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, Byrne’s “musical re-thinkings here aren’t among his most compelling, but Byrne’s always had great backing bands and his best material is indestructible.” Spike Lee’s “approach to the show coverage is mostly solidly unspectacular,” finds Rizov. “He often chooses to disrupt the proscenium presentation for cut-ins that highlight groups of musicians as they rearrange themselves onstage in predictably elaborate choreography—this destroys unity of presentation, but you get the overall idea.”

At the very least, American Utopia is shot through with “more cinematic dynamism than the recent film version of Hamilton,” writes Adam Nayman at the Ringer. “A comparison between the two productions is instructive: Where Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award–winning musical plays now as a relic of the Obama era, American Utopia, from its slyly ironic title on down, has been devised as a dispatch from Trumpland, with Byrne positioning himself as a figure of gentle, principled resistance. An alternate title could be Start Making Sense.” At Slant, Jake Cole notes that at a time when the pandemic has “devastated both the theatrical and live-music industries, American Utopia feels as much like a balm as it is a surprisingly direct call to political action and social betterment.”