Peter Doherty: Stranger In My Own Skin is the third film about Doherty to hit screens in recent times. You wait all day for a documentary about the turbulent life of a Libertines frontman, etc. There was a Channel 4 film about the still unsolved death of Mark Blanco, after he attended a house party with Doherty in 2006, then in November, Louis Theroux turned his unsparing eye on Doherty’s new-ish life in France, where he lives with his wife (since 2021), Katia de Vidas. Stranger In My Own Skin came out in cinemas at around the same time, but is just now making its way to television. It tells the very intimate story of Doherty’s addictions over the decades, using personal, unflinching footage that has been accumulating since 2006. It should be very intimate: it has been directed and mostly shot by De Vidas.
Clearly, this is one for fans, and what it gains in intimacy, it loses in objectivity and perspective. Anyone expecting a repeat of Theroux’s microscopic gaze will not find it here. Whole sections linger on Doherty’s paintings and poetry, his many side projects and how adored he has been over the years. In fact, it starts pretty unpromisingly, leading us into the narrative with a flowery poetic voiceover from Doherty, who says that “there is no neat, arranged story”. Anyone clocking the two-hour run time at this stage may be left wondering if they have the stomach for 120 minutes of this sort of thing. It whizzes through the Libertines’ early heyday, and then the Babyshambles afterglow, in the first 20 minutes, and does a good job of capturing what was so magnetic and exciting about that time. At risk of sounding like James Murphy on Losing My Edge, LCD Soundsystem’s timeless ode to ageing, I was there (at least for some of it), and it really was thrilling and messy and vibrant. I’m not quite sure it was the Beatles in Hamburg, as one-time Rough Trade A&R rep James Endeacott suggests in this film, but it was definitely a moment.
This is less about the glory days, though, and more the inglorious chaos around Doherty’s longstanding relationship with hard drugs, which he describes without ever softening the blow. De Vidas first began filming him in Paris in 2006, long after his addiction had begun, and a couple of years after the Libertines had broken up for the first time. Doherty had been in and out of prison, and whether he would turn up for a gig was anyone’s guess. He describes first realising that he was addicted to heroin, and more often than not in the historical footage here, he is agitated and wired, or drowsy and drooling. There is explicit footage of him taking drugs. You do wonder if, with all the talk of freedom and artistry, of Wilde and Dostoevsky and his beloved James Joyce, of the weird nostalgia inherent in calling heroin “laudanum, opium”, there is going to be a risk of, if not glamorising, then at least romanticising his addiction, setting him up as a kind of social outlaw. On balance, I don’t think it does romanticise it. It is so desperate and gruesome that more often than not, it all just seems very sad. Watching him in a state, as he delays and delays going to rehab in Thailand with just “one more bag”, is truly grim.
Theroux seemed to get at an ongoing love of, and for, everything that drug use represents to Doherty, perhaps even still, but this film has a tendency to shy away from any deeper analysis of that sort. It shows a life of addiction, but only picks at threads of greater interest without ever really following them to their end. He talks, briefly, about his difficult relationship with his military father, about his years as a fixture of the tabloids, even a bit about prison, but these clear-eyed interludes usually drift off into the ether, half-formed, meandering towards another painting or poem or song.
In this respect, it can be a frustrating watch. You end up wanting a more objective eye on it, a more focused view that can sift through the hours and hours of footage and coax it into something less dreamy and abstract. But then, when the honesty and the insight comes, it is arresting. A scene in which Doherty returns to heroin, and acknowledges that he knows he is on the wrong path and is afraid of dying, is vivid – more so because he has asked for it not to be filmed. That De Vidas did film it is one of the benefits of being up close and personal. Years later, in what seems to be his recovery, it stands as an odd symbol of hope, that he was able to move beyond it.
• Peter Doherty: Stranger In My Own Skin aired on Sky Documentaries and is available on Now.
