Talking Heads broke up long ago, but David Byrne is still making solo albums. The latest, American Utopia, included a nationwide concert tour that ended up in long-term residence on Broadway. (Very long term; it was running before COVID shut down Broadway, and has returned now that Broadway has reopened.) The show features a mix of Byrne solo songs and Talking Heads classics (plus a powerful cover song by another artist). Plus, plenty of the performance antics that anyone who knows David Byrne might expect.
Stop Making Sense was famously directed by a rather big name director: Jonathan Demme would later make The Silence of the Lambs, among many others. To direct the filming of American Utopia, Byrne turned to an even more recognizable name. This movie is a "Spike Lee Joint." Lee is one of those directors with an encyclopedic knowledge of film, and he clearly is very aware of everything Demme did in the concert movie many call the best ever made. His directorial choices on American Utopia are almost in conversation with the earlier film.
Stop Making Sense shows very few shots of the crowd, focusing the camera on the stage more than many concert films. American Utopia picks up this technique, but then makes better choices still on how the stage is captured. A smaller stage, the ability to position more (and smaller) cameras, and very smart choices in editing all add up to much better coverage of the musicians and their stagecraft.
And there is plenty of stagecraft to behold. This is a rock concert in instrumentation. But Byrne decided that he didn't want any of musicians to be rooted in one place. So instead of one drummer obscured behind a drum set, there are half a dozen percussionists who each wear different pieces of a traditional kit; kick drum, toms, hi-hat, ride and crash cymbals, and snare are all divided among performers who can interweave with a keyboard-toting musician and the expectedly free-roaming guitarists, bassists, and singers.
With this unusual band, Byrne has choreographed and controlled this show to a degree that transcends a conventional concert and does indeed make it start to feel more like a Broadway show. I know I've never been to a concert that looks and feels quite like this, and I'm pretty sure most people haven't either.
But, all that praise given, there are some ways in which this movie can't match Stop Making Sense. One is the alchemy that was the particular musicians in Talking Heads in 1983 -- they're better than the sum of their (considerable) parts, with a presence equal to their musical talent. And the set list for American Utopia simply isn't as good. It's not just a matter of "play the hits" vs "we hate the new stuff," because there are some intriguing newer gems I'd never heard, mixed in with more famous tunes from the 70s and 80s. The concert keeps building and building momentum through the first two-thirds, until three slow and introspective songs in a row sap all the energy from the proceedings. (I feel like waves of people must go for the restroom and concessions at that stretch.) The momentum does come back again, heading into the final songs, but this isn't the "every song is a banger" triumph of Stop Making Sense.
I'd give David Byrne's American Utopia a B-. It's streaming on HBOMax, so relatively easy to access for those who might be interested. And I think any fan of David Byrne and/or Stop Making Sense would probably be interested. It's a good performance, even if not as good.
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