“I pray I can sit and watch this one day with you,” Pete Doherty tells Katia De Vidas, a lighter flickering in his hand as he uses hard drugs, unaware that the camera is still rolling. He’s asked her to stop filming, but secretly, she defies him.
The singer-songwriter is on the cusp of what should be a triumphant 2010 reunion show with The Libertines headlining Reading and Leeds. Instead, an introspective, gloomy Doherty can only focus on his intense feelings of regret. He admits that he hopes De Vidas doesn’t end up watching this film the day after his funeral. “I want to make it through to the other side,” he insists. “I’m going about it the wrong way.”
Stranger In My Own Skin, shot over the course of a decade, is filled with these sorts of deeply intimate and upsetting moments. It’s perhaps unsurprising that he is at his most open with her; De Vidas is now his wife, and they got together midway through the period covered by the film.
For much of this documentary, which splices together personal footage, concert film, and artwork, Doherty is jittery, high, spaced-out, or strung out. He is either in the immediate grip of drug addiction, desperately trying to put off getting clean in order to have “one last bag”, or clinging to still-precarious sobriety.
Despite starting after the initial rise of The Libertines (De Vidas started documenting his life at a Paris gig in 2006) Stranger In My Own Skin captures the excitement and electricity of their breakthrough well, though it does fall victim to a little hyperbole along the way (comparing them to “The Beatles in Hamburg,” for example, feels a bridge too far).
After the band falls to pieces, he forms Babyshambles. In backstage footage shot on tour, Doherty admits he’s been awake for five days; the late Amy Winehouse makes a fleeting appearance backstage at another gig. A day before he’s sentenced to three months in prison, he admits that he is most frightened of the inmates who have read about him in the tabloids, and want to make jibes about his former relationship with Kate Moss. Other scenes show uncensored footage of him using heroin, or struggling with withdrawal.
With its unparalleled levels of access and trust, Stranger In My Own Skin is far more revealing than last year’s Louis Theroux documentary, which didn’t always probe very deeply â but beyond the unflinching footage, it also has a tendency to gloss over large swathes of Doherty’s story in service of a too-neat overarching narrative.
It’s immensely revealing hearing him speak with wonderment about watching Liverpool football fans screaming from the Kop at Anfield as a kid, and wanting crowds to bellow his songs back at him one day in a similarly tribal manner; as is the brief segment in which Doherty speaks about how his parents’ military background and living on the barracks “behind barbed wire, not allowed to do reality” shaped his desire to rebel, but these moments are ultimately few and far between.
The film is largely narrated by Doherty, who often speaks in a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness manner about how drugs “became like a sacred key to another dimension”.
Though much of the film makes for difficult viewing, there are also flashes of humour; during a press conference following The Libertines’ reunion, Doherty jokes with a journalist who asks if getting the band back together is playing a role in recovering from “well-documented” addiction issues. “Not really, I’m trying to keep it as quiet as possible,” he fires back with a smirk.
On one of his regular visits to Paris, the musician goes to an exhibition about the death penalty. Though he explains that Dostoyevsky’s famous novel Crime and Punishment is his favourite book of all time, it all proves a bit much in the end. “F**king hell, it goes on, doesn’t it?” he remarks. “How much punishment do they want?”.
Towards the end of the film, a particularly touching scene shows Doherty performing solo in Brussels on his birthday. After years of estrangement, he’s seemingly patched things up with his dad, who surprises him by joining him on stage for What A Waster; despite not always supporting Doherty’s music career he knows every single lyric, and jokingly mimes along.
Afterwards, Doherty’s mum comes on with a birthday cake. In a voiceover, Doherty admits it’s “a bit naff” and hardly the stuff that rock’n’roll mythology is built on, but the wide grin on his face in the footage seems to reveal how he truly feels about it.
It's a shame that there is not much more analysis of who exactly Doherty is, beyond the slightly glamourised, tortured genius narrative that largely underpins this film. The hour and a half, liberally peppered with Doherty’s drawings and paintings, could benefit from tighter editing, and more depth.
Though it captures a vivid sense of Doherty’s struggles with substance addiction, it feels like an omission too that this film does not stop to examine the issues with music industry figures who presumably pushed him to continue writing and touring, nor the apparent lack of support.
Nor does it interrogate the seductive pull of drugs in rock’n’roll. The tragic case of Mark Blanco, who died the same year filming began while attending the same party as Doherty, is not mentioned once, which feels like a mistake.
While things end on a decidedly hopeful note, a younger Doherty proudly waving a French flag on the clifftops, and running down the beach into the mist, seemingly clean for good, subsequent relapses and legal brushes are left unmentioned in the text which recounts what Pete did next over the next decade.
The result is a cleanly tied-up narrative, but a slightly misleading version of events â it’s a shame given the incredible candour on show for most of the time.
