What is the purpose of the music documentary? For controversial Michael Jackson film Leaving Neverland, it’s to give a voice to those previously deprived of one. In Netflix’s Fyre, directors sought to work out what exactly happened to cause what was billed as a luxury music festival to descend into utter chaos.
In David Bowie: Finding Fame – released ahead of the 50th anniversary of Space Oddity – the BBC sets out to tell the “untold story” of how David Robert Jones became the immortal Ziggy Stardust, and changed the entire landscape of music as he did so. “Finding Fame is the story that finally makes sense of one of the greatest icons of the 20th and 21st centuries,” the synopsis reads.
Directed and produced by Francis Whately, this is the final instalment of the award-winning David Bowie Trilogy, which was preceded by Five Years, and The Last Five Years. Finding Fame opens in 1966, the year David Jones changed his name to Bowie. There are interviews with his former bandmates, family members, and also his girlfriend and muse, the dancer Hermione Farthingale, who has never been filmed talking about him before. Farthingale’s segments are the most poignant of the film, interspersed with audio interviews of Bowie who was clearly heartbroken when she left to join a theatre project in Norway.
“I wrote my letter to Hermione on my album, there that will show her, if I write something that public then she’ll see that she really messed me up,” Bowie confessed of his song, “Letter to Hermione”. “I missed him terribly, we missed each other, as friends apart from anything else. That’s what we really missed,” Farthingale says.
As moving as these moments are, the question as to whether any of his fans really want to “make sense” of David Bowie is uncertain. Like Prince and Kurt Cobain, Bowie’s allure is that he is, above all, an enigma, who as much as we relate to or adore, will never truly understand. The Last Five Years admitted as much, with its final impression of Bowie being one of a man who was, essentially, unknowable, so the fact Whatley is attempting (unsuccessfully) to undo that in his final documentary, is rather odd in itself.
