In 2016, David Bowie’s death shook the world like a supernova – a deliberately-staged explosion that collapsed a lifetime of personas into a single, blinding point of closure. Ten years later, with a glut of posthumous Bowie films in tow, the question is no longer what remains to be said, but how it can still be said.
The Final Act treats Bowie less as a subject than as a cosmological 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 of Blackstar, 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 a sweep through Bowie’s career, punctuated by flashes of a literal black star onscreen to remind us where we are supposedly headed. Stiasny returns to the beginning, perhaps in an effort to situate Blackstar within a wider 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. A brief nod to the global success of Let’s Dance is quickly eclipsed by Bowie’s disillusionment with it, while Ziggy Stardust is reduced to a fleeting 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 all else.
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 the star.
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.
But The Final Act is not attempting reinvention so much as consolidation. If its aim is to frame Bowie’s final years as a deliberate act of authorship, the film largely succeeds. By turning Blackstar into a self-authored requiem, Bowie is shown to mythologise his own death with a degree 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.