Remembering the Normcore David Bowie

[Bowie]

It's a tribute to David Bowie’s mystique that the most striking footage of David Bowie: The Last Five Years is of him on stage in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans. Taken from a 2004 stop in Germany on the aptly named Reality Tour, this was, in fact, the image Bowie left the world with: He collapsed after the show, and would never play a full set again. Yet the visuals to be popularly enshrined after Bowie’s death in 2016 were of the more fantastical sort. Aladdin Sane and his lightning bolt became the memorial. Normcore Bowie didn’t.

But normcore Bowie is all over The Last Five Years, a BBC production that HBO is airing Jan. 8 (Bowie’s 71st birthday, two days before the two-year anniversary of his death). The director Francis Whately’s previous work, Five Years, was about Bowie’s iconically fabulous ’70s and ’80s; this one is largely about 2011 to 2016, a period when Bowie recorded two albums and created one musical. The film argues that Bowie used those efforts to deconstruct and rebuke his own legend—which had the clever effect of reinforcing it.

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Whately’s methods themselves are jarringly workmanlike. He splices together insights from the rocker’s associates and voiceover drawn from archival Bowie interviews, and bookends each section of the film with Bowie quotes written out onscreen. It’s a small thing, but the typography used here—even if inspired by the singer’s own work—is unfashionably garish for its application in the film. Some of the creative choices, such as when a music video is projected onto the window of Bowie’s recording booth as the raw audio from the track plays, are straightforwardly hokey. Bowie, a man of taste and a knack for the not-obvious, might have asked for a more stylish presentation.

But as the documentary goes on, the unfussy approach comes to feel appropriate. Bowie gave no interviews in his final years, and we see no footage of his recording sessions. Instead, his collaborators—including rock players for The Next Day, a jazz ensemble for Blackstar, the producer Tony Visconti for both—rehearse their compositions anew on camera amid testimonials. We hear about Bowie handing out non-disclosure agreements, giving drumming instructions, and keeping shorter hours than he did at his peak (presumably due to his health problems). What emerges is an oddly endearing notion: Bowie as manager, Bowie as bandleader, Bowie as clock puncher—though enigmatic in all cases. “If you got a smile, you’d gone in the right direction,” the guitarist Gerry Leonard says of Bowie’s recording-session directing.