David Bowie: The Last Five Years (2017) on Netflix
G20171h 30mDocumentaryMusic
David Bowie ends years of silence and returns to the studio to make two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar, and the musical Lazarus. Musicians and colleagues recall the sessions.
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- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.5/103,013 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
The story begins in 2004, when David Bowie fell ill onstage in Germany and his final world tour came to an end. Nearly a decade of quiet follows, then a return to work: two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar, and the musical Lazarus. Because Bowie gave no interviews in those years and little footage of him exists, the film brings the musicians from the last two records back together to play the sessions again, films a stage production of Lazarus in New York, and catches the Blackstar band at a New York jazz club. Colleagues, designers and video directors add what they remember, and the archive includes silent footage of him singing Lady Stardust.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about David Bowie: The Last Five Years (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The Lazarus video showed Bowie lying on a deathbed, though that was not meant to represent his illness, and its director only learned later that Bowie had discovered his cancer was terminal the very week the video was filmed.- The film's archive producer found never-before-seen footage of Bowie becoming irritated while being filmed talking with artist Damien Hirst at a New York City exhibit; director Francis Whately thought it a compelling moment for a man desperate for fame who then felt ambivalent about it.
- The team also unearthed unseen silent black-and-white footage of Bowie singing "Lady Stardust", and the film's editor synced the silent images to a bootleg recording of the song obtained for the documentary.
- With almost no archival documentation to work from, Whately reunited the musicians from Bowie's last two albums to recreate the studio sessions, and filmed the Blackstar players at New York's 55 Bar, the same club where Bowie had first seen them perform.
- Director Francis Whately said the end of Bowie's life was basically undocumented, with no recent media interviews and very little archival footage, and that he had sleepless nights over how to fill 90 minutes of film.
