In 2016, David Bowie’s death shook the world like asupernova– adeliberately-staged explosion that collapsed alifetime of personas into asingle, blinding point of closure. Ten years later, with aglut of posthumous Bowie films in tow, the question is no longer what remains to be said, but how it can still besaid.
The Final Act treats Bowie less as asubject than as acosmological apparition. Director Jonathan Stiasny is concerned not with revelation but with design–how an artist who spent his career shapeshifting engineered the conditions of his own disappearance. It’s an endeavour he mostly succeeds in.
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Stiasny frames his film around the making ofBlackstar, Bowie’s final album, released just two days before his death in January 2016. His illness is present but deliberately veiled, shaping the work without ever becoming its centre. And yet, despite the film’s title, the artist’s final venture is only directly addressed in the film’s closing ten minutes. Most of the runtime is taken up by asweep through Bowie’s career, punctuated by flashes of aliteral black star onscreen to remind us where we are supposedly headed. Stiasny returns to the beginning, perhaps in an effort to situateBlackstar within awider context, but the result dilutes what was promised as the film’s central idea.
The Final Act traces Bowie’s constant reinvention, though pointedly sidesteps the most over-saturated chapters of his career. Abrief nod to the global success ofLet’s Dance is quickly eclipsed by Bowie’s disillusionment with it, while Ziggy Stardust is reduced to afleeting reference. Instead, the film spotlights the artist’s more abrasive Tin Machine years and later drum and bass experiments with Tao Jones Index through the 1990s. The cumulative effect is familiar but persuasive– Bowie cared little for commercial glory, prioritising exploration above allelse.
Interviews with friends are interwoven among archival footage, photographs and recorded reflections from Bowie himself, sketching the devotion inspired by his magnetism as well as the restlessness that made it disposable. Critic Jon Wilde recalls his scathing review that made Bowie cry in 1991; actress Dana Gillespie remembers his sunrise debut on the Pyramid Stage in 1971; novelist Hanif Kureishi admits the transient nature of friendship with thestar.
Visually, the film favours documentary orthodoxy over the formal risk that Bowie himself represented. For an artist who treated identity as performance and disappearance as strategy, the film’s restraint feels curiously conservative.
ButThe Final Act is not attempting reinvention so much as consolidation. If its aim is to frame Bowie’s final years as adeliberate act of authorship, the film largely succeeds. By turningBlackstar into aself-authored requiem, Bowie is shown to mythologise his own death with adegree of foresight that remains astonishing. Stiasny closes with the artist’s words on changing the fabric of music, suspended in the vastness of space that he always occupied.
