Sound and vision: 10 perfect Bowie needle-drops in films

Six years after his untimely passing, David Bowie’s influence continues to loom large over film culture. His music elevates moments in everything from big budget blockbusters to the latest works from renowned auteurs, while his legacy as a character actor has ensured his immortality in cinema history. Yet he always refused to let his own story get told: recent biopic Stardust followed Todd Haynes’ pseudo-biopic Velvet Goldmine (1998) in failing to secure the rights to his songs.

Other filmmakers have been much luckier. Here are some of the finest uses of Bowie’s legendary back catalogue in the movies.

Chris Petit’s directorial debut is that rare beast: the British road movie. Traversing the industrial landscapes of London and Bristol, and points in between, its subtle surrealism is aided by a soundtrack of new wave and krautrock classics, including several highlights from Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. 

’Always Crashing in the Same Car’ is the standout, playing as protagonist Robert (David Beames) drives past the Ballardian tower blocks overlooking London’s Westway Interchange. As captured in stunning black and white by Martin Schäfer, Wim Wenders’ assistant photographer, the romantic potential of the brutalist cityscapes is uncovered. It briefly makes a song that’s synonymous with the German capital feel both distinctively British and entirely otherworldly. 

Uli Edel’s film is one of the most harrowing screen depictions of addiction. The director’s masterstroke comes slightly before his teenage protagonist (Natja Brunckhorst) succumbs to the temptation of using heroin for the first time. He perfectly illustrates the allure that led her down this path. With Bowie’s ‘“Heroes”’ blaring on the soundtrack as Christiane and her new friends run from the police through a shopping arcade, Edel captures a moment of teenage rebellion with a sense of genuine euphoria – the kind of high you imagine they will forever be attempting to replicate.

It’s the standout in a film stuffed with excellent Bowie needle drops, including a mid-film live performance of ‘Station to Station’.

Jonathan Demme’s first film after his Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense (1984) also contains a fantastic live performance. As the unexpected road trip of yuppie Charlie (Jeff Daniels) and free-spirited Audrey (Melanie Griffith) leads the pair to a high school reunion, this genre-bending comedy takes a pause before shifting gears into thriller territory, Demme dropping everything to capture New Jersey post-punk group The Feelies covering ‘Fame’ at the reunion. 

As in Stop Making Sense, the genius is in the simplicity: Demme makes sure his roving camera gets a chance to spotlight every band member, highlighting their importance in the collaboration before we circle back to the characters on the dance floor. It’s a small moment, but made total magic by Demme’s willingness to let it breathe.

Leos Carax’s unconventional heist movie contains some of the most unforgettable scenes of the 1980s stylish ‘cinéma du look’ movement. The plot is loose enough to take in everything from skydiving set pieces to a glorious and often homaged musical interlude. As Alex (Denis Lavant) finds himself falling for Anna (Juliette Binoche), Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’ suddenly kicks in, and in one unbroken shot we find Lavant running through the city, contorting his body in a state of breathless emotion. It’s one of the perfect visualisations of how it feels to fall for someone.

In just a decade, Bowie’s music went from being used to signify cool to conveying a sense of 70s/80s nostalgia as the star slipped away from the zeitgeist. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Grosse Pointe Blank. As John Cusack’s hitman finds himself confronted with his bad life decisions since graduating at a high school reunion, ‘Under Pressure’ booms from the disco speakers while he faces up to peers having married and had kids, while his life is still “in progress”. In one moment, director George Armitage perfectly marries the nostalgia of the song with a melancholy glimpse at one man reckoning with his choices.

By David Lynch’s own admission, Bowie was no longer considered cool by the time he made his memorable cameo in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). And yet, in the same era that his music began being used in films to evoke nostalgia, Lynch used a track from his overlooked 1995 album Outside to further complicate his nightmarish 1997 neo-noir Lost Highway. With different variations of ‘I’m Deranged’ used over the opening and closing credits, the filmmaker made Bowie an important piece of a seemingly impenetrable puzzle – the constant soundtrack on a journey down an endless road. Featured on the soundtrack alongside of-the-moment industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, it rejuvenated the star’s cultural standing. 

Lars von Trier has never been shy about using Bowie’s best known hits, culminating in the use of ‘Fame’ in a dark comic set piece in The House That Jack Built (2018). But his most provocative use of a classic Bowie track comes at the end of Dogville, his unsubtle criticisms of structural evil in American society reaching a cynical conclusion through an end credits montage of images from Jacob Holdt’s book American Pictures, which documents poverty-stricken Americans. This typically outrageous finale distils the essence of von Trier’s best work: it may provoke anger and shock, but you’ll be unable to turn away.

Seu Jorge’s Portuguese covers of Bowie classics provide a structural backbone to Wes Anderson’s offbeat nautical comedy. Each cover was performed live on set (and in character) by Jorge, who changed many lyrics in the translation to represent his own experiences while making the film.

After only hearing snippets of these Ziggy Stardust-era covers throughout, nestled alongside Anderson’s usual 60s favourites and a euphoric Sigur Rós track, it’s a joy to get a full live cover of ‘Queen Bitch’ as the end credits roll. Prior to filming, Jorge only knew one Bowie song, but when he released an album of Bowie covers in 2005, the liner notes featured a loving message from the star himself. 

Typically, it’s Quentin Tarantino who can claim the most memorable cinematic (re)use of a Bowie track that was written for a different film altogether. Recorded for the soundtrack of Paul Schrader’s 1982 Cat People remake, Bowie’s song returns to the screen to open the third act of Inglourious Basterds as Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) prepares her revenge against the Nazi regime responsible for killing her family.

In the highly stylised worlds Tarantino creates, pop soundtracks help his heroines regain their sense of agency in the face of adversity – and, by that metric, this might be the single best use of music throughout his career.

In the mid 2010s, there was a wave of mega-budget sci-fi films mining the intergalactic potential of Bowie’s earliest, sci-fi indebted songs. ‘Starman’ made an appearance in Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), while the opening sequence of Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) was scored to the entirety of ‘Space Oddity’.

Like most trends in modern blockbusters, this appeared to have originated with Marvel, as ‘Moonage Daydream’ (the sole Bowie song on Star-Lord’s ‘Awesome Mixtape’) kicks in during a euphoric moment of travel to far-flung cities in the sky.