David Bowie’s story ended poignantly. On 8 January 2016, he released Blackstar, an album recorded with the knowledge that he would not live to make another. Two days later, on 10 January 2016, just as listeners and reviewers were starting to laud Blackstar as the tenderest ever expression of his craft, Bowie died.
Perhaps only Bowie could have turned his demise into a perfectly timed creative event and, in Jonathan Stiasny’s feature documentary The Final Act, Blackstar is presented as a definitive masterstroke, the closing chapter that makes sense of the rest of the book. To make that case, the film has to take some narrative-shaping liberties, because in reality Bowie’s career was, like most artistic arcs, full of false starts and long pauses. The Final Act dabbles in some parts of the Bowie timeline and elides others before focusing intently on moments that don’t deserve the attention. But in its effort to find a new angle on Bowie and make us love him afresh, it succeeds.
Blackstar is seen as a redemption, a coming to terms with the singer having lost his way in the 1980s and 90s. The programme begins in 1983, where we find Bowie at a level of mainstream fame that didn’t sit comfortably with him. “I didn’t want whatever it was I’d earned for myself with the success of Let’s Dance,” he says in an archive clip from some years later. Some might say he tolerated the anguish for quite a while, since the low point of this era, a Pepsi ad made with Tina Turner, was not until 1987. But The Final Act is all about showing us a vulnerable, fallible Bowie, so we’re not minded to quibble.
He rather overreacted with Tin Machine, the rock band formed, to the bellowed disgust of fans and critics, at the end of the 80s. Most bios skip over Tin Machine as quickly as they can, but this film – which ignores Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station and the whole Berlin trilogy – has built a thesis around it, so it digs deep. The group’s guitarist, Reeves Gabrels, makes a decent attempt at defending the intention behind the music.
The reviews, however, were unforgiving. One of them is read aloud here by its author, Jon Wilde, who in the present day is visibly stunned by how viciously disrespectful he was in calling Bowie a “poor deluded fool” and a “fucking disgrace”. Wilde reports that when that week’s Melody Maker reached Bowie in Switzerland, the great man sobbed. Equally damning is a clip of Terry Wogan, having watched Tin Machine perform on his chatshow in 1991 wearing horrific collarless suits, skewering them with one of his trademark polite but devastating inquiries: “What are you trying to do?” Bowie was unsure of the answer for the rest of the 90s, dipping into rave culture and drum’n’bass.
In between assessments of the fallow years, the programme leaps back to cover the sudden termination of the Ziggy Stardust persona in 1973 and Bowie’s brief but brilliant foray into soul with Young Americans in 1975. In the eternal debate about whether he was an alien genius beaming pure visions to us from somewhere between outer space and next week, or a canny magpie stealing whatever was cool from a cultural movement before travelling remorselessly on, The Final Act leans towards the latter: more than one interviewee candidly, but not at all bitterly, describes being on the end of Bowie’s tendency to find creators and form a deep bond with them, before ditching them once he had got what he needed.
Eventually that relentless dilettantism created a barrier separating Bowie from his public, before the two came back to each other at the 2000 Glastonbury festival, where Bowie dispelled fears that he would do two hours of experimental jazz-rock and instead delivered a stunning stripped-down version of Life on Mars?, showing he was at last at ease with his status as a beloved heritage act with a corking back catalogue. His subsequent sporadic recorded work was retrospective and personal rather than self-consciously of the moment.
If the Glasto show is lingered on – a few too many people are handed an iPad playing the footage, so they can mist up as they rewatch – the indulgence comes from a place of deep affection, and it sets us up to accept that the 2000 triumph began a journey towards Bowie accepting himself that Blackstar completed. That final record is still such a delicate, moving message from the edge of heaven, even more so with the benefit of the insights here from musicians who so carefully worked on it. Ten years on, the loss still stings, but this film brings Bowie a little closer.
• Bowie: The Final Act is on Channel 4 now.
