Let’s get this out of the way right now: David Bowie probably doesn’t want you to see this film. He’s done a good job of making a great deal of archival performances legitimately available – even his infamously twitchy, sniffy interview with Dick Cavett from 1974 – but Cracked Actor (broadcast early the next year) remains a YouTube only curio. One of Alan Yentob’s first significant pop-culture films, made for the BBC’s Omnibus series, it’s best known for two reasons: capturing some of the only known live footage of his extravagantly-staged Diamond Dogs tour, and documenting Bowie at the peak of his coke-addled madness.
Yes, Cracked Actor depicts a confused artist, trying to fit in somewhere he doesn’t understand – trying to start, as a wise man once said, “a new career in a new town”. In spite of the fact that his records stopped revolving around specific characters at this point, the film still revolves around artifice and affectations, trying to impose order on a man who is purposefully living in chaos. Right from the first scene – Bowie watching a flickering, motor-mouthed version of himself interrogated by an American newscaster on a tiny TV screen – he ducks and weaves his way out of direct questioning, like the boxer he would later portray on the sleeve of Let’s Dance. There are glimmers of personality – his endearingly exaggerated lip-syncing to Aretha Franklin on a car radio, or some sincere-looking paranoia when a police car takes to the road behind him – and even a couple of relatively candid, self-effacing admissions: “I’m very happy with Ziggy, I think he was a very successful character, and I think I played him very well, but I’m glad I’m me now... my god, I can trot ‘em out!” Still, on the whole, he’s an evasive interviewee, sometimes even faking an accent to take the edge off any real sense of revelation. Take, for example, Yentob’s opening question, an exchange that almost justifies any coked-up Bowie parody ever attempted:
Yentob: Since you’ve been in America, you seem to have picked up on a lot of the idioms and themes of American music and culture. How has that happened?
Bowie [looking down at a carton of milk]: There’s...there’s a fly, floating around in my milk! It’s a foreign body in it, you see, and it’s getting a lot of milk. That’s kind of how I feel. I couldn’t help but soak it up.
Sadly, Yentob is just as guilty of contributing to this mythology, laying on the mystery somewhat thick with footage of Bowie literally playing with a variety of theatrical masks, or superimposing memorials to rock casualties over a performance of – you guessed it – ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’. More perplexing still is its anticlimactic finale; after teasing us with some revealing shots of Bowie working out vocal arrangements to ‘Right’ (Young Americans) with his backing singers, then cutting to a live performance of his questionable disco single ‘John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)’, Yentob simply states “So David Bowie becomes a soul singer,” and the film ends. It’s almost like the pointless minutes of wax museum stock footage seemed more important to Yentob than properly drawing his story to any kind of resolution. Fortunately, the performances themselves are great; shorn of the lame shimmer present on the David Live album (though also shorn of Mick Ronson), the band are slick without being oppressively polished, even taking into account Bowie’s increasing reliance on his backing vocalists. The staging, meanwhile, remains fascinating – witness a take on ‘Cracked Actor’ that sees him clad in shades, hounded by his entourage – one touching up his make-up, another fiddling with lighting – while singing directly to (and then making out with) a skull, like some kind of perverted Hamlet. But then there are the fans. “I mean, five years ago you could have caught these turkeys down in the Fillmore, chowing down on chitlins and black-eyed peas with the Brothers and Sisters. Now they’re into faggots. They want desperately to relate to perverts.” Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City (1976).
It’s not like Bowie didn’t mean the world to a generation of kids, and it’s got to be hard to condense why you love an artist into one soundbite. Yet, Yentob seems to single out the leftover hippies in the audience, who happen to be daubed in glitter. Like their idol, they too witter on about being “drawn to the Bowie universe,” and celebrating their own uniqueness whilst looking laughably similar to each other. Or in some cases, just laughable. Also worth a mention are the bedroom theorists, insisting that the entire Ziggy Stardust album is based on the rise and fall of none other than Jimi Hendrix; presumably, after the cameras finished rolling, these kids went back to trying to sync Dark Side of the Moon up with The Wizard of Oz. Then again, just a few years on from Bowie hitting San Francisco’s Winterland, many of the same “space cadets” would be sticking safety pins in their faces and gobbing on each other for the Pistols, as if Ziggy never died for their sins. Cracked Actor may not be as much of a mess as the man it portrays, but it certainly comes damn close. Legendary though it may be, it’s a film that simply can’t decide if it wants to expose, analyse or merely indulge its subject.