⚡David Bowie Five Years Review: The Five Years That Made a Starman
This David Bowie Five Years review looks at the BBC documentary that opens Bowie’s personal archive. It zeroes in on five turning points in his career. Director Francis Whately skips the usual birth-to-fame timeline. Instead, he drops us into 1971, 1975, 1977, 1980, and 1983, the years when Bowie reinvented himself and dragged popular music along with him. Unseen footage, studio outtakes, and the musicians who were in the room make this one essential viewing for any Bowie fan.
David Bowie Five Years Review: A Starman in Five Chapters
Most music documentaries start at the beginning.
The childhood home.
The first guitar.
The early bands nobody remembers.
David Bowie: Five Years doesn’t bother with any of that.
It picks five years.
Five moments when David Bowie became somebody new.
And it lets the footage do the talking.
The title comes from “Five Years,” the opening track on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
In the song, the world has five years left.
In the documentary, five years are enough to explain why Bowie mattered.
That’s a clever trick.
It’s also the perfect way to cover a career that never stood still long enough to fit in one neat story.
David Bowie: Five Years premiered on BBC Two on May 25, 2013. Francis Whately directed and wrote it, and produced it with Phil Dolling. It runs 90 minutes. Showtime gave it a United States debut on August 1, 2014. That same premiere night in the UK, BBC Two followed it with Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth.
This David Bowie Five Years review stays spoiler free.
Francis Whately Had the Keys to the Kingdom
Francis Whately didn’t walk into this project cold.
He had worked with Bowie on a BBC Omnibus film back in 2001.
He spent more than a decade developing the idea for Five Years.
That kind of patience shows.
Whately clearly knows his subject.
He also knows when to step out of the way.
There’s no celebrity narrator walking us through the story.
No talking head explaining what we’re supposed to feel.
Bowie’s own archive interviews do most of the narrating.
The musicians fill in the rest.
That’s a smart choice.
Bowie was always his own best storyteller, even when he was making half of it up.
The Bowie Archive Finally Opens Its Doors
Timing is everything.
In 2013, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum opened its blockbuster exhibition, David Bowie Is.
It became the fastest-selling show in the museum’s history.
The V&A approached Whately while planning the exhibition.
He wanted a film that would complement the show without copying it.
The result shares the same treasure chest.
Bowie’s personal archive.
Costumes.
Set designs.
Handwritten lyrics.
Memorabilia most fans had never seen.
Then there’s the footage.
Unseen material from the studio.
From the road.
From behind the scenes.
Previously untransmitted interviews.
For a Bowie fan, it’s like being handed the key to a locked closet in the back of the house.
And 2013 had already turned into a Bowie year.
After a decade of silence, he had surprised the world with “Where Are We Now?” and the album The Next Day.
Nobody saw it coming.
That’s very Bowie.
1971: Ziggy Stardust Lands
The first stop is the breakthrough.
The documentary’s 1971 chapter stretches into 1972, and for good reason.
That’s when Bowie became Ziggy Stardust.
Red hair.
Platform boots.
Jumpsuits that looked like they arrived from another galaxy.
With guitarist Mick Ronson at his side, Bowie stopped being a promising songwriter and became a phenomenon.
Hunky Dory arrived at the end of 1971, bringing “Changes” and “Life on Mars?” with it.
The Ziggy album followed in June 1972.
One of the treats here is an outtake from the “Life on Mars?” video.
Bowie, red mullet and all, drops the persona for a moment and simply relaxes.
It’s a small moment.
It’s also a rare look at the person behind the character.
The documentary lets you see how deliberately Ziggy was built.
The look.
The sound.
The attitude.
Nothing about it was an accident.
1975: The Thin White Duke Arrives
By 1975, Ziggy was gone.
In his place stood a sharply dressed soul singer living in America.
This is the Young Americans era.
Bowie called it plastic soul.
The documentary’s 1975 chapter also reaches back into 1974 to tell the story properly.
Ava Cherry, Bowie’s former girlfriend and backing singer, remembers taking him to the Apollo in Harlem.
Carlos Alomar recalls the day he first met Bowie.
Alomar would go on to become one of his longest-serving guitarists.
There’s studio footage from the Young Americans sessions, including Bowie working alongside a young Luther Vandross.
Vandross sang backing vocals and helped arrange the vocal parts on the record.
Watching a future soul legend at work before anybody knew his name is worth the price of admission.
Then the mood darkens.
Alomar and guitarist Earl Slick talk about making Station to Station.
That’s the album that introduced the Thin White Duke.
Cold.
Elegant.
Unnerving.
The film also uses unseen black-and-white outtakes from Cracked Actor, Alan Yentob’s 1975 BBC documentary that followed Bowie across America.
Including a performance of “Right.”
That footage alone will send collectors straight back to their bootleg shelves.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Here’s where Bowie’s story takes a detour into the movies.
Director Nicolas Roeg reached out to Bowie in early 1975, around the time Cracked Actor was making the rounds.
He found his alien.
Roeg cast Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton, a visitor from another planet, in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
The film is based on Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel of the same name.
Bowie shot it in New Mexico in 1975, right in the middle of the period this documentary covers.
It reached theaters in 1976.
And Bowie didn’t have to stretch very far.
Pale skin.
Orange hair.
That distant, fragile stare.
He already looked like he had fallen from somewhere else.
The film’s connection to this period makes it a natural companion to Five Years.
The movie and the music fed each other.
Here’s one for the record collectors.
The cover photo on Station to Station is a still from The Man Who Fell to Earth.
The cover photo on Station to Station was taken by Steve Schapiro on the set of The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Check your copy.
Bowie is stepping into a spacecraft.
The BBC clearly understood the connection.
On the night Five Years premiered, BBC Two followed it with the full movie.
That’s how you program a Saturday night.
If you watch Five Years, make it a double feature.
The two belong together.
1977: Berlin, Eno, and Heroes
Then Bowie disappeared to Berlin.
He was worn out.
He needed to get away from Los Angeles and everything that came with it.
What came next was some of the most adventurous music of his career.
Low.
“Heroes”.
Two albums released in the same year.
Brian Eno talks about working with Bowie during this period.
Producer Tony Visconti describes introducing Bowie and Eno to a new studio toy, the harmonizer.
Guitarist Robert Fripp discusses his contributions to Low and “Heroes”.
Listening to these guys explain how the sounds were made is like getting a free music lesson from the professors who wrote the textbook.
Bowie wasn’t only working on his own records in Berlin.
He co-wrote and produced Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and Lust for Life, both released in 1977.
That’s four landmark albums in one year from the same man.
The “Heroes” album was recorded at Hansa Studios, close enough to the Berlin Wall to see the guard towers.
You can hear that tension in the music.
The documentary makes you hear it a little more clearly.
1980: Ashes to Ashes and the Elephant Man
By 1980, Bowie was looking back at his own past.
“Ashes to Ashes” brought back Major Tom from “Space Oddity.”
Only this time, the astronaut wasn’t a hero.
The song topped the UK chart.
Its video became one of the most famous of the era.
The documentary shows the original storyboards for that video.
Seeing the sketches next to the finished clip is a real treat.
The album was Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).
It was also his final studio album for RCA, the label that had released his records since Hunky Dory.
That same year, Bowie took on a completely different challenge.
He played John Merrick in The Elephant Man on Broadway.
No prosthetics.
No makeup tricks.
Just posture and performance.
Five Years includes footage from that run.
It’s a reminder that Bowie the actor was more than a rock star in a costume.
1983: Let’s Dance Takes Over the World
The final chapter is the biggest.
In 1983, Bowie went mainstream in a way he never had before.
Let’s Dance was everywhere.
Radio.
MTV.
Stadiums.
Nile Rodgers of Chic produced the album.
In the documentary, Rodgers picks up a guitar and shows exactly what he brought to “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl.”
That scene is pure joy.
Watching a master explain his own riffs never gets old.
Let’s Dance came out on EMI America, a fresh start with a new label.
The title track went to number one in both the UK and the United States.
The album also featured a young Texas guitarist named Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Bowie’s Serious Moonlight Tour followed, playing to enormous crowds.
The documentary ends here, with Bowie at the height of his commercial success.
It’s a fitting place to stop.
From Ziggy’s spaceship to sold-out stadiums in twelve years.
Not bad for a kid from Brixton.
The Musicians Tell the Story
The real strength of Five Years is who gets to talk.
Not just famous fans.
The people who were actually in the studio.
Carlos Alomar.
Earl Slick.
Robert Fripp.
Brian Eno.
Tony Visconti.
Nile Rodgers.
Ava Cherry.
These are the folks who helped build the records.
They tell stories nobody else could tell.
They remember who played what.
Which ideas worked.
Which ones didn’t.
Cultural critic Camille Paglia also weighs in on Bowie’s image and influence.
Mick Ronson appears too, through archive material, since he passed away in 1993.
And Bowie himself appears throughout in archive interviews, including chats with Russell Harty, Dick Cavett, and Jeremy Paxman.
Even Andy Warhol turns up in archive footage.
That’s quite a guest list, and it’s a big reason this David Bowie Five Years review recommends the film.
The Unseen Footage Is the Real Treasure
Every Bowie fan has seen the famous clips.
Ziggy on television.
The “Ashes to Ashes” video.
The Let’s Dance era in all its glory.
Five Years goes deeper.
Studio recordings that go wrong.
Outtakes that were never supposed to leave the building.
Interview footage that sat on a shelf for decades.
Those little moments are what make this documentary special.
You see Bowie laughing.
Thinking.
Trying something, failing, and trying it again.
It’s the opposite of the polished image he spent years creating.
That candid side of Bowie is the biggest takeaway from this David Bowie Five Years review.
The sound team earned some attention too.
The film won the 2014 BAFTA Television Craft Award for Best Sound: Factual.
It also took home a Focal International Award for Best Use of Music Performance Footage.
Turn this one up.
Five Years Is a Collector’s Dream
This is where Kilroy gets excited.
Every era in this documentary lines up with a record you can still find in the bins.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Young Americans.
Station to Station.
Low.
“Heroes”.
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).
Let’s Dance.
Watching this documentary is a great way to understand why each of those records sounds the way it does.
It might also send you digging through the stacks for an original pressing.
Bowie remains one of the best-selling artists in history, with an estimated 140 million albums sold.
That means plenty of copies are still out there.
Finding clean ones is the fun part. Consider this David Bowie Five Years review your shopping list.
The Start of a Bowie Trilogy
Francis Whately wasn’t finished with Bowie.
After Bowie’s death in January 2016, Whately returned with David Bowie: The Last Five Years.
That film looked at the final chapter, including The Next Day and Blackstar.
HBO premiered it in the United States on January 8, 2017, which would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday.
Whately then went back to the very beginning with David Bowie: Finding Fame in 2019.
That makes Five Years the middle of the story, even though it came first.
Watch all three, and you get the whole arc.
But Five Years remains the best place to start.
It’s where Bowie burned brightest.
Who Should Watch David Bowie: Five Years?
Bowie fans, obviously.
But this one reaches further than that.
Record collectors who want the stories behind the albums on their shelves.
Musicians curious about how classic songs were built in the studio.
Fans of glam rock, soul, Krautrock, and 1980s pop.
Movie fans who love The Man Who Fell to Earth.
And anybody who has ever wondered how one artist could change so completely, so often, and still sound like himself.
You don’t need to know every Bowie album to enjoy it.
You’ll probably want to own them all by the end.
Every recommendation in this David Bowie Five Years review comes back to the same thing.
The footage.
Final Thoughts 4.4/5
Wrapping up this David Bowie Five Years review, Francis Whately’s documentary is an essential portrait of rock’s greatest shape-shifter. By focusing on five pivotal years, it captures Bowie in motion rather than in a museum case. The unseen footage, the musicians’ stories, and the archive treasures make it a must for fans and collectors alike.
“A dazzling, essential portrait of David Bowie at his most daring.”
ML Lamp, Kilroy Was Here Shop
Most documentaries try to tell you everything.
Five Years tells you what matters.
Ziggy Stardust.
The Thin White Duke.
Berlin.
Major Tom’s return.
The global superstar.
Five years.
Five different David Bowies.
One extraordinary career.
And plenty of footage you’ve never seen before.
Bowie sang that we had five years left.
This documentary proves five years was all he needed to change music forever.
