David Bowie has been served with some outstanding documentaries in recent years, from the granular detail of the Five Years trilogy to the celebratory montage of Moonage Daydream. But Bowie: The Final Act – in cinemas on Boxing Day, and on Channel 4 on January 2 for the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death – is the best of the lot. That’s partly because of what has gone before. Having seen the competition, director John Stiasny can avoid the most documented, mythologised parts of Bowie’s career – namely Ziggy and Berlin –to create an essay on mortality and creativity as much as a biography.
David Bowie has been served with some outstanding documentaries in recent years, from the granular detail of the Five Years trilogy to the celebratory montage of Moonage Daydream. But Bowie: The Final Act – in cinemas on Boxing Day, and on Channel 4 on January 2 for the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death – is the best of the lot. That’s partly because of what has gone before. Having seen the competition, director John Stiasny can avoid the most documented, mythologised parts of Bowie’s career – namely Ziggy and Berlin –to create an essay on mortality and creativity as much as a biography.
After a riveting opening graphic sequence – a black hole becomes a black star becomes Bowie’s eye – we are dropped into Sydney in 1983. It’s the start of the Serious Moonlight tour and Bowie has a new look and a plan to embrace mainstream stardom – at least, until he gets bored. But Stiasny accepts that, at this point at least, there isn’t a great deal that is new to be said about Bowie’s music, his chameleon-like instincts or his unparalleled ability to assimilate unexpected new influences into his work.
Instead, Bowie: The Final Act chooses to tell that story in a different and more original way, highlighting the overlooked or dismissed parts of Bowie’s biography to reveal a bigger picture. So, from the Serious Moonlight stadiums the film leaps forward to the end of the decade, before plunging back to the 1960s to draw parallels with Bowie’s past, offering context for his decision-making. In this zigzag fashion, we touch on key moments from the second half of his career – Tin Machine, The Buddha Of Suburbia, Glastonbury, his heart problems on the Reality tour – and more selective, discretionary points from his past, chosen to illuminate the present.
In this way, Tin Machine is connected to the demise of Ziggy Stardust, while Bowie’s appropriation of drum and bass for Earthling is linked to the soul of Young Americans. This brings us inevitably to Blackstar, the “final act” of the title and an album for which Bowie drew on everything he had learned before, enabling him to address the inescapable reality of death.
It’s an unusual format, but Stiasny leans on an excellent pool of interviewees: Dana Gillespie, Tony Visconti and Rick Wakeman give us the late ’60s up to “Space Oddity”; Mike Garson and Earl Slick talk us through the ’70s and ’80s; Gary Kemp explains what it was like to be a young fan at the final Ziggy show; and Reeves Gabrels painstakingly explains Tin Machine for the umpteenth time. At one point, journalist Jon Wilde recites his withering review of the second Tin Machine album from Melody Maker that made Bowie cry. Hanif Kureishi, great to see after his recent illness, and Goldie talk us through the 1990s, while Jason Lindner represents the Blackstar band. Each interviewee is so well chosen that even when Jayne Middlemiss pops up there’s no great alarm – she may seem a little incongruous in this company, but you can trust they know what they are doing.
This is complemented by the well-chosen archive footage – the first Glastonbury, Tin Machine on Wogan, the famous Paxman interview, “Life On Mars” at Glastonbury in 2000 – with the interviewees occasionally handed a laptop to watch the footage they are commenting on, a trick used effectively on last year’s Led Zeppelin film.
Goldie, like many, is still stunned by the depth of his sorrow at Bowie’s death, while Kureishi says that while he knows Blackstar is a work of genius, it’s a record he can’t bring himself to listen to. As astronaut Chris Hadfield says, in sonorous voiceover, at the beginning and end of the film, a black star is “a manifestation of the edge of possibility… a force so powerful it can distort time itself”.
And Bowie’s final act? To make himself immortal.
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