“The Last Five Years,” as the title implies, was ostensibly made to shed light on the creation of his final two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar, and the musical Lazarus, based on both the Nicolas Roeg movie “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (in which Bowie starred) and a hefty chunk of Bowie's ‘70s musical output. But Whately either didn't have enough material or wasn't interested in making those projects the sole focus of the film, so he also spends a lot of time looking back on Bowie's life and career, his songs, his characters, and his final tour. This is plainly too much information for one film to handle. The film begins with The Reality Tour, his last series of public performances, and the health crisis that pulled him from touring after nearly 40 years on the road. When he resurfaced in 2011 to record in secret, it shocked even his closest friends. The resulting albums are correctly regarded as fascinating and brilliant, a worthy addition to his catalog of genre bending classics.
The insights Bowie's former bandmates provide about his life and these final records is valuable, but limited, and there's a yawning chasm of difference between the best and worst interview subjects. Listening to Carlos Alomar, Bowie's rhythm guitarist for most of the ‘70s, talk about his creative process during the recording of the album Heroes is humbling and fascinating, and it doesn't last longer than two minutes. A whole movie could be made about that album alone. Including a few seconds about it, in the middle of a movie about The Next Day and Blackstar, doesn't really make any sense. It's not called “The Last 40 Years,” is it? Early in the movie, Whately decides upon an interesting if ultimately frustrating device where the session players on the final albums play vocal-free versions of the songs from both albums, so we can see the way they're constructed. He abandons this approach after two songs on The Next Day, and only kind of picks it up again in the home stretch when discussing the creation of Blackstar with composers Maria Schneider and Donny McCaslin. Whately also talks to the directors of his last music videos, a mixed bag of information. Floria Sigismondi just describes the transparent thematic ideas behind her video for "The Stars Are Out Tonight" in the most ludicrously pretentious yet completely basic terms. Johan Renck, who directed the arresting "Blackstar" video, has the film's only real emotional moment when he describes Bowie skyping in to tell him he was dying of cancer.
The many threads ought to tell you how frustrating an experience the film is, leapfrogging from one formal choice or line of inquiry and never deciding what story it's telling. Bowie contained multitudes, and the best the movie can do is hint at a handful of them in frequently silly ways. Guitarist Earl Slick says things like "From a musical point of view, that's way old, old school, those chord changes…but if you listen to the lyrics…there's subject matter there." Get outta town. Slick later pops up to say that Bowie was "very interested in society." The movie is as formally and thematically vague as those statements. There's a borderline “This is Spinal Tap” moment where one of his associates describes the process of deciding The Next Day album art and the extremely profound revelation that occurred when they turned a photo upside down, and how that opened up so many possibilities for the record design. There's just no way any Bowie fan, casual or die-hard, needed any of that inanity. And then there are little careless mistakes, as when they introduce Donny McCaslin via text twice in the space of a minute, in case you'd immediately forgotten the name of the man with the enormous saxophone who leads the Donny McCaslin Band. No documentary should make you think of John Stamos being deliberately introduced twice in David Wain's “They Came Together,” let alone one about the most important artist of the 1970s.
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