In 2016, David Bowie’s dying shook the world like a supernova – a deliberately-staged explosion that collapsed a lifetime of personas right into a single, blinding level of closure. Ten years later, with a glut of posthumous Bowie movies in tow, the query is not what stays to be mentioned, however the way it can nonetheless be mentioned.
The Ultimate Act treats Bowie much less as a topic than as a cosmological apparition. Director Jonathan Stiasny is anxious not with revelation however with design – how an artist who spent his profession shapeshifting engineered the situations of his personal disappearance. It’s an endeavour he principally succeeds in.
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Stiasny frames his movie across the making of Blackstar, Bowie’s closing album, launched simply two days earlier than his dying in January 2016. His sickness is current however intentionally veiled, shaping the work with out ever turning into its centre. And but, regardless of the movie’s title, the artist’s closing enterprise is barely immediately addressed within the movie’s closing ten minutes. A lot of the runtime is taken up by a sweep by means of Bowie’s profession, punctuated by flashes of a literal black star onscreen to remind us the place we’re supposedly headed. Stiasny returns to the start, maybe in an effort to situate Blackstar inside a wider context, however the outcome dilutes what was promised because the movie’s central concept.
The Ultimate Act traces Bowie’s fixed reinvention, although pointedly sidesteps essentially the most over-saturated chapters of his profession. A temporary nod to the worldwide success of Let’s Dance is shortly eclipsed by Bowie’s disillusionment with it, whereas Ziggy Stardust is diminished to a fleeting reference. As a substitute, the movie spotlights the artist’s extra abrasive Tin Machine years and later drum and bass experiments with Tao Jones Index by means of the 1990s. The cumulative impact is acquainted however persuasive – Bowie cared little for business glory, prioritising exploration above all else.
Interviews with associates are interwoven amongst archival footage, images and recorded reflections from Bowie himself, sketching the devotion impressed by his magnetism in addition to the restlessness that made it disposable. Critic Jon Wilde remembers his scathing assessment that made Bowie cry in 1991; actress Dana Gillespie remembers his dawn debut on the Pyramid Stage in 1971; novelist Hanif Kureishi admits the transient nature of friendship with the star.
Visually, the movie favours documentary orthodoxy over the formal threat that Bowie himself represented. For an artist who handled identification as efficiency and disappearance as technique, the movie’s restraint feels curiously conservative.
However The Ultimate Act is just not trying reinvention a lot as consolidation. If its purpose is to border Bowie’s closing years as a deliberate act of authorship, the movie largely succeeds. By turning Blackstar right into a self-authored requiem, Bowie is proven to mythologise his personal dying with a diploma of foresight that continues to be astonishing. Stiasny closes with the artist’s phrases on altering the material of music, suspended within the vastness of house that he at all times occupied.
