David Bowie: You’re Not Alone at Aviva Studios

10 years after his death, it feels like the world will never be done with David Bowie. The towering discography, the reinventions, the sheer scale of the worlds he created. The more time passes, the more it all seems like something no mere mortal could have pulled off. David Bowie: You’re Not Alone brings the Starman back down to earth and reminds us what actually made his music matter: not the alien mystique, the shapeshifting personas, the elaborate artifice – but the human underneath it all.

David Bowie: You’re Not Alone is a 60-minute immersive film drawing on never-before-seen material from the David Bowie Archive – footage, photographs, drawings, personal notes – to build a portrait of the man rather than the myth. It’s produced by Lightroom, the immersive production company that, in a crowded market of digital gimmickry, has built a reputation for genuine quality.

It’s been designed by Mark Grimmer and Tom Wexler of 59 (a Journey studio), with the former’s previous credits including the V&A’s David Bowie Is exhibition and Lightroom’s David Hockney: Bigger & Closer. Where the V&A show gloried in the iconography, You’re Not Alone goes in the opposite direction, stripping back the characters – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke – to find the person behind them.

The show is structured thematically, moving through the subjects Bowie kept returning to: theatricality, spirituality, songwriting (naturally). It features only one narrator: Bowie himself, speaking through hundreds of archival interviews spanning six decades. No talking heads, no collaborators, no biographers. This is a form that usually relies on other people to build the story – but few artists have left behind such a rich and eloquent record of their own inner life.

The format sits in interesting tension with its own argument. The spectacle is considerable: 11-metre projected walls, spatial audio, a digitally reconstructed Diamond Dogs set. But the show’s argument is that, beneath it all, Bowie was a fallible – if brilliant – person trying to understand what it meant to be alive. An unearthed 1975 television interview with chat show host Russell Harty, for example, catches him visibly off-guard – evasive, slightly out of it, the performer’s mask slipping. It turns out to be more illuminating than the polished later reflections that make up most of the narration.

The immersive format has produced its share of cynical cash-ins, which makes the strength of the London reviews all the more notable. Monocle’s critic, a self-declared sceptic of immersive experiences, wrote that it left her feeling as though she had actually attended a Bowie gig. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis – not a critic who hands out praise lightly – said “it’s hard not to be swept away”.

The title You’re Not Alone comes from what Bowie told a Glastonbury crowd in 2000. It became one of his most quoted live moments, often held as capturing the paradox at the heart of his career: that the alien made the alienated feel less alone. This show argues that it wasn’t Bowie the alien that did this, but the gloriously, stubbornly human being underneath.