Fourteen months before the release of Blackstar, and his own death two days later, David Bowie put out a strange compilation chronicling his career in reverse, from 2014’s “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” to 1964’s “Liza Jane.” The title—Nothing Has Changed—was a provocation. An artist who critics had lazily described as a shapeshifter for decades was insisting there was unity to his work. He owned it all, even the goofy stuff he recorded as a teenager still going by Davy Jones. Listening to Nothing Has Changed was like retracing Bowie’s steps through 50 years of music history and finding that they really did cut a clear path.
David Bowie: The Last Five Years, an invaluable BBC doc that comes to HBO on what would have been Bowie’s 71st birthday (Jan. 8), makes a similar argument. The film’s stated aim isn’t simply to investigate the unexplained creative renaissance of a cultural icon who retreated from public life in the mid-2000s, but to demonstrate how those final works “reveal the real David Bowie.”
Director Francis Whately reuses many of the same techniques he employed in a previous BBC project, 2013’s David Bowie: Five Years, a solid fan-service doc that details five remarkably productive periods of Bowie’s career. The visuals are a patchwork of familiar and never-before-seen archival footage, interviews with Bowie collaborators across every imaginable art form, and new scenes of his bands playing the songs they recorded with him. In lieu of a voice-over, audio clips from Bowie interviews, news reports, and on-screen text propel the narrative. The difference between Five Years and its sequel is the connection the new film forges between Bowie’s early and late work. It’s a postscript that, while not conventionally revealing, sheds light on an artist often accused of lacking a core self.
Before delving into Bowie’s comeback, Whately begins with his final tour in 2004 and the onstage heart attack that prematurely ended it. Band members like Gail Ann Dorsey and Earl Slick recount how upbeat and funny Bowie was on the road, how young he looked at age 57. This prologue features wonderful behind-the-scenes footage of Bowie goofing around with his tourmates at truck stops and cracking jokes backstage. Performance footage and archival audio reveal that he had little residual interest in creating high-concept spectacles—he just wanted to play his songs. A few of his longtime collaborators recall feeling as though they were seeing the real man for the first time.
So, what made Bowie shrink from the spotlight even after he recovered? Maybe the prospect of more two-and-a-half-hour headlining sets worried him, but that doesn’t explain why he stopped making albums and rarely appeared in public. Rumors swirled for years, based on little more than a few paparazzi creepshots, that he was critically ill. (In 2011, the Flaming Lips and Neon Indian teamed up on a song with the attention-seeking title “Is David Bowie Dying?”) But those who knew him best claimed, after Bowie’s death, that he’d only been sick for about 18 months, and Whately avoids rehashing tabloid headlines. Thanks largely to the film’s collage structure, the possible explanations that emerge for his absence have more to do with his personality.
Whately’s year-by-year breakdown of Bowie’s trajectory between 2011 (when he began work on 2013’s The Next Day) and 2015 illuminates his career-long preoccupations—with theater, outer space, sneaking avant-garde sounds into pop—through individual songs. A section on “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” and its Tilda Swinton–starring music video, in which celebrities stalk regular people and covet their anonymous lives, becomes an inquiry into his fraught relationship to stardom. As Whately traces this ambivalence back to Ziggy Stardust’s story of rock’n’roll martyrdom, the singer Ava Cherry recounts how Bowie (her ex) urged her to craft a persona that would appeal to millions but that he himself remained weary of celebrity. Tony Visconti, the producer who worked with Bowie for nearly half a century and has become his most perceptive interpreter since his death, suggests Bowie viewed fame as simply a means of acquiring “the resources to realize what his ideas were.”
The conversation implies that Bowie might have disappeared because he’d already made all the money and art he needed, and wanted to try living quietly. Maybe the heart attack sparked that realization. Maybe it aggravated the anxiety about death and the future that suffuses his music, but that his bold public persona obscured. And maybe he came back because the idea of fading away became even scarier. The closest Whately gets to offering answers about his subject’s personal life are a few interviews where friends and collaborators, some of them near tears, recall the moment when Bowie told them his cancer was terminal.
Whately does have an ear for revealing quotes, though; in one interview, Bowie confesses that, despite his apparent obsession with astronauts and aliens, he’d be too scared to ever consider getting into a spaceship. In another snippet of audio, Bowie explains that the birth of his and Iman’s daughter, Alexandria, in 2000 made him apprehensive about what’s to come. “What a disappointing 21st century this has been so far,” he laments—a chilling assessment from one of pop culture’s most prescient futurists.
Perhaps The Last Five Years is too reverent. It opens and closes with familiar shots of fans mourning Bowie in cities around the world, tears smudging their lightning-bolt face paint. There’s a touching “what a guy” moment when a still-incredulous Donny McCaslin, the jazz saxophonist whose quartet helped shape the sound of Blackstar, describes Bowie’s surprise and delight that McCaslin was willing to play on his album. Not even the talking heads who knew him during his cocaine-hell years have a negative word to say about him.
But no artist is a genius, a saint, a sage, and a perfect gentleman 100 percent of the time. Bowie’s musical career had its low points, just like his private life. Blackstar was a masterpiece; The Next Day was nothing more or less than a solid comeback album. When looking back on their antecedents, though, Whately rarely revisits Bowie’s “sellout” ’80s or trend-chasing ’90s. Despite its refreshing argument, the documentary is a celebration more than an investigation.
That isn’t such a big misstep, in the grand scheme of things. The popular discourse about Bowie during his lifetime was pretty superficial, gearhead deconstructions of Low and a few notable exceptions aside. Even worse than the shapeshifter clichés were the glib attempts to sum up his impact on the culture through images of flashy haircuts and glittery platform boots, inevitably reducing him to an avatar for fluid sexuality. Bowie’s untimely death was a tragedy, but at the very least, it finally got us really discussing his body of work. The Last Five Years continues that necessary conversation.
David Bowie: The Last Five Years airs Jan. 8 at 8 p.m. on HBO.
