‘A global pandemic is only in the top three weird things that have happened to me in the last three years,” Lewis Capaldi notes at the start of this generically made but nonetheless startling Netflix documentary about his rise. After years strumming in Scottish pubs and clubs, his raw piano ballad Bruises went viral and lift-off was vertical: his debut album became the biggest seller in the UK in both 2019 and 2020, and its single Someone You Loved, a seven-week chart topper in the UK, made him the first Scottish solo artist to reach US No 1 since Sheena Easton in 1981. An endearing goofball on social media, Capaldi won even more fans by puncturing influencer culture with his blithely unglamorous image, but his japes disguised a man suffering from terrible anxiety, panic attacks and a shoulder twitch that would later be diagnosed as a Tourette’s symptom.
These highs and lows are documented by Joe Pearlman, using the same televised-therapy approach he used to great effect for his film Bros: After the Screaming Stops. He follows Capaldi, now massively famous, to a studio in his Whitburn family home where he starts work on his second album. There’s a flash of typical Capaldi wit as he’s recognised by a woman sat in an optician’s far across the street: “You’re cured!”
