Ten years after David Bowie’s death, Bowie: The Final Act offers an overview of the iconic singer’s career, with a particular emphasis on how he turned his confrontation with death into his album Blackstar, his parting artistic statement.
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We’ve been here before: David Bowie: The Last Five Years, Francis Whately’s documentary from 2017, meticulously detailed its subject’s autumnal resurgence, similarly using archive footage, upcycled quotes, music videos and first-hand interviews.
Both projects are hampered by Bowie’s limelight-averse final years. His death from cancer on January 10th, 2016, just two days after his 69th birthday and three days after releasing Blackstar, was a profound shock – and, as several Final Act commentators note, a characteristically effective piece of theatre.
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This film from the TV veteran Jonathan Stiasny features thoughtful analysis from various old muckers: the musicians Rick Wakeman, Earl Slick and Reeves Gabrels, the author Hanif Kureishi, and the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, whose cover of Bowie’s Space Oddity aboard the International Space Station went viral in 2013.
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Embraced as a musical primer, Bowie: The Final Act offers an amiable if scattershot overview that hopscotches between early Glastonbury, Ziggy Stardust and Blackstar.
Tin Machine, Bowie’s short-lived rock band between 1988 and 1992 – their two harder, experimental albums introduced distance from the singer’s pop success with Let’s Dance – leave a surprisingly expansive footprint.
As Moby, one of the film’s talking heads, observes, such radical shifts “make people mad”. Jon Wilde, the former Melody Maker critic, recalls being summoned into his editor’s office, where Bowie’s reps informed him that his review dismissing Bowie as a “disgrace” caused the star to burst into tears.
Bizarrely, Earthling, Bowie’s 1999 flirtation with drum and bass, also receives more attention than bigger, better albums, including Low and Black Tie White Noise.
[ David Bowie, 1947-2016: an extraordinary life at the cutting edgeOpens in new window ]
No matter. This is a fond requiem from a Bowie fan, made with reverence for his art and respect for his privacy. Save for two brief glimpses of Bowie’s son, Zowie (aka the film-maker Duncan Jones), and daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, there are no domestic details, no salacious allusions to his cocaine-powered pansexual era.
Stiasny’s film instead amplifies the idea of Bowie as a constantly evolving artist, even if it occasionally overstates the ebb and flow, framing Bowie’s triumphant headline set at Glastonbury in 2000 as the beginning of a late reinvention. It was ever thus, surely.
In cinemas from St Stephen’s Day
