David Byrne builds an Oscar-qualifying song from Elon Musk's own words

David Byrne has written an original song for Musk, the documentary Alex Gibney has made about Elon Musk, and he did not have to invent a word of it. "Let Me Sell You a Dream" takes its lyrics entirely from Musk's own public statements, and it will be submitted for Best Original Song consideration at the 2027 Academy Awards.

"All his own words. No editorialising. Straight from the man's mouth to mine," Byrne told Variety. He co-wrote the track with Daniel Pemberton, the film's composer, and started the process by asking for good quotes from the Martian before going hunting for more of them online.

Gibney has described the result as foot-tapping sardonic poetry. The director won an Oscar for Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room in 2005 and has since made Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief and The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley, and calls this film a definitive and unvarnished examination of its subject. Musk has called it a hit piece, a line he first used on X when the project was announced in 2023; Gibney's reply was to ask how he would know.

A nomination would put Byrne back in the Oscar race for the first time in nearly four decades. He won Best Original Score in 1988 alongside Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su for The Last Emperor. Pemberton has been there more recently, nominated in 2021 for "Hear My Voice" from The Trial of the Chicago 7.

The film itself runs close to four hours. It premieres out of competition at the Venice International Film Festival on September 8 before heading to Toronto, and Bleecker Street puts it into US theatres on October 16.

Byrne is having an unusually cinematic year besides. His Who Is the Sky? tour has been filmed for a concert film by Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist, shot on 70mm across sold-out nights at Baltimore's Hippodrome and now in post-production, arriving in the same season as Paul Thomas Anderson's Cameron Winter concert film. The show it documents runs 13 musicians, singers and dancers through material from the 2025 album alongside Talking Heads songs including "Psycho Killer" and "Burning Down the House", which keeps his rock catalogue in circulation while the Oscar campaign runs. He wraps the US leg of the tour on September 19 at Forest Hills Stadium in New York, and publishes a book, Sleeping Beauties, on October 6.