‘Last 5 Years’ haunting docu
‘David Bowie: The Last Five Years,” which premieres Nov 10 at the DOC NYC film festival (it will then be shown on HBO), is a singular and haunting pop documentary. It’s a companion piece to “David Bowie: Five Years,” the 2013 documentary in which director Francis Whately meditated on the pivotal period of Bowie’s fame, from 1970 to 1975. That movie dug deep into the heady fascination of the first rock star who was passionate and Warholian at the same time — an image junkie who kept rotating his look and aspect, and did it as casually as most of us change underwear.
“The Last Five Years,” also directed by Whately, was assembled under the shadow of Bowie’s death (he died on Jan 10, 2016). It’s about a very different man: one who remained, to the end, a committed artist even as he was living as a retired pop star. Bowie’s exit from the spotlight of celebrity happened quite suddenly, on his 2004 Reality Tour. During that series of arena shows, he had never been more joyful or unironic on stage — an ageless satyr-prince, one who was now willing to just stand up and boogie, reveling in the glory of his golden years. But during one show, he collapsed and had to be helped off stage; it turned out he’d suffered a minor heart attack. That’s when Bowie called it quits, withdrawing into a meditative New York existence with his wife, Iman.
The movie recounts that cataclysm (and the healing that followed), and then traces the intimate process by which Bowie, after an extended break, returned to make two albums: “The Next Day” (2013), which marked his first encounter with the recording studio in seven years (it counts as the last vintage Bowie album), and “Black Star” (2016), an experimental jazz-fusion song cycle that was undertaken only after Bowie learned that he was battling cancer. He also wrote and staged a New York theater musical, “Lazarus.” What breathes through “The Last Five Years” is that Bowie, even before he knew he was ill, was consciously looking back — not as a way of living in the past, but as a new way to look forward.
Doubtful
It’s doubtful that a rock star has ever aestheticized his own death the way that Bowie did on “Black Star” (or in “Lazarus”). But even here, the vantage was that of an embrace. The way Bowie imagined it, Major Tom was heading back to space, to a deeper part of it than he’d ever known. Death, to Bowie, would not be an end; it would just be another one of his changes.
For years — for decades — whenever people wrote or talked about Bowie, it was required that they discuss his never-ending evolution in image, music, persona, attitude as if he were the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll shape shifter. He didn’t invent that, of course. The original visionaries of pop shape-shifting, and still the all-time champions, were the Beatles. They established the template for reinventing yourself — from year to year, album to album, hairstyle to hairstyle — as a magical form of postmodern alchemy. But Bowie was the first to codify what the Beatles had pioneered, and in doing so he helped to set the stage for everyone from Madonna to U2 to Lady Gaga.
If you grew up with Bowie, then his famous gallery of images and unofficial characters — the mournfully out-there Major Tom, the glam-rock ambisexual alien peacock Ziggy Stardust, the melting-with-decadence cocaine vampire The Thin White Duke, the ironically “normal” blond dude in a blond suit who presided over the autocratic pop of “Let’s Dance,” and so forth — may well have struck you as larger-than-life. Each persona, in its way, was catchy, indelible, momentous. But if you grew up a little later, or if you look back on Bowie with open eyes now, the changes that appeared all-powerful then don’t seem nearly so profound. “The Last Five Years” filters the twilight of Bowie’s career through the prism of an era when he reigned as pop royalty, and what you perceive now, far more than the fashion-forward evolutions, is the dazzling continuity beneath them.
As the documentary captures rather startlingly, it’s less important today that Bowie was wearing psychedelic rainbow lightning facial stripes or rooster hair, or playing a boy swinging like a girl, or recovering from drug addiction in Berlin as he reinvented electronic Euro pop, or launching singles infectious enough to be Top 40 hits, or retiring to the studio in his early 60s to craft an album of soulful yearning in conditions secretive enough to launch the Manhattan Project. (RTRS)