“Doctor Who” may have got its global premieres synchronized, but it took a year for “David Bowie: The Last Five Years,” a film about Britain’s other great cultural spaceman, to make it to the United States. Francis Whately’s film, which premiered in the U.K. in January 2017, came to HBO on Monday on what would have been the singer’s 71st birthday and two days before the second anniversary of his death from liver cancer.
Not much has changed in that time, of course, at least as concerns us here. Bowie still feels essential, necessary and oddly present — a useful example, the global legend as inspirational outsider. This is briefly a sad story — he dies in the end — but it isn’t a tragic one.
Five years, as fans will know, is the number of years left to the world in Bowie’s song “Five Years.” (Halfway through the documentary, the song appears in a splendid 1976 performance from “The Dinah Shore Show.” ) And it’s the distance from 2011, when Bowie secretly went to work on a new album, eventually titled “The Next Day,” to 2016, when he died, having produced another new album, “Blackstar,” released on his final earthly birthday, and an off-Broadway musical, “Lazarus.”
Whately, who made the 2013 Bowie documentary “Five Years” (on five key, nonconsecutive years in the artist’s career), marshals pretty much the full cast of Bowie’s late-career collaborators, including band members, designers, video directors and the “Lazarus” creative team. Producer Tony Visconti, who worked with Bowie on and off from his first album to his last (and was a member of Bowie’s pre-Ziggy costume band, Hype, whose gear anticipated the Village People more than it did the Spiders from Mars), is present at a mixing board, isolating vocals, analyzing parts and remembering a friend.