Lewis Capaldi Netflix documentary review: How I’m Feeling Now is a vicarious thrill

Lewis Capaldi.

Married reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch the rise and fall and rise again of an unlikely star.

SCORES

Songs: 5

Jokes: 5

Mental health hygiene: 1

SHE SAW

Watching the trailer, it’s quite obvious that Lewis Capaldi has Tourettes, so it’s astonishing he doesn’t find out himself until about three quarters of the way through the documentary. Up until that point he was calling it an anxious twitch and seemingly no one suggested he get it professionally diagnosed. Not even anyone in Los Angeles, the most over-diagnosed city in the world. In some ways, it seems representative of the loneliness of fame that Capaldi would be suffering so publicly with a relatively well understood and recognisable condition and yet no one reaches a hand out to him. He is left on his own to figure it out and like many young men, he procrastinates on that for far too long.

I’d heard of Lewis Capaldi and knew I’d recognise his big hits but I had never before laid eyes on him. He’s not your typical looking pop star. In this documentary at least, he almost always looks like he needs a shower, has never worked out or brushed his hair and is probably on day three to four of the same T-shirt and underwear. It’s telling that when he’s packing his bag for a songwriting trip to LA half the clothes he tosses into the suitcase still have tags on them. My assumption is that his mum bought them because at home he is still very much an ineffective teenage boy.

But the 26-year-old is disarming. It’s Capaldi’s lack of pretence not only in his appearance but in all his interactions that makes him so likeable. There are times in the film when his openness about his struggles with self-esteem and mental health clearly make the executives in the room uncomfortable. His transparency makes their facades so much more obvious and they don’t know how to deal with that.

Following a meteoric rise with his first album - Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent - the title of which perfectly captures Capaldi’s self-deprecating sense of humour, the documentary was originally supposed to follow the making of Capaldi’s second album. But, with Capaldi’s crippling lack of confidence in his own musical abilities and deteriorating health, the film quickly becomes a study of mental illness.

Capaldi is what makes this documentary interesting. A film about making a second album is a boring premise and while filmmaker Joe Pearlman says that was the initial goal, one has to assume he had a pretty good idea that Capaldi was dealing with something much bigger than that. It’s not visually or formally innovative: the central interview set-up is nigh on ugly. But Capaldi’s candidness and inability to hide his true self are refreshing and now, knowing his story, I find his songs slightly less droning.

HE SAW

I like to think of myself as a rational and independent-minded selector of movies, my decisions influenced exclusively by Rotten Tomatoes scores, so it was with some embarrassment that I sat glued to the Netflix home screen last week as it auto-fed me a scene from this documentary I had previously had no interest in watching.

The clip showed famous singer Lewis Capaldi sitting in the kitchen at his parent’s house, while his dad harangued him about his uncontrollable shoulder twitch. The scene perfectly captured the extraordinary intensity of the issues that make up most family conflicts, but which we seldom see outside our own homes. To see one of the world’s most famous entertainers engaging in a stupid argument with his father was a richly rewarding experience. It was like reality TV but real.

The argument captivated me and I knew immediately that I would watch the whole movie, but the scene got even better after Capaldi stormed off, leaving us with his mother and father, who stood around awkwardly for a few seconds before his mum gave his dad a light telling off about the whole situation and the camera lingered on his dad, who accepted the criticism but was clearly roiling with internal conflict

The clip demonstrated the difficulties of dealing with the people we love when they’re annoying. “You should just ignore it.” his mother said after Capaldi left the room.

“I can’t ignore it,” his father replied.

Who was in the right? Sometimes it’s the right thing to do to let things slide, but was this one of these times? As it turns out, this question is central to the documentary, one of the best famous music person documentaries of recent times.

The success of the documentary is partly down to this sort of incredible access and fly-on-the-wall footage, and partly because Capaldi himself is such a winning and compelling character: Funny, self-deprecating, honest, ridiculous and – as we come to learn – at the mercy of a condition nobody seems able to diagnose, even when it’s on display to more or less the whole world, presumably including a lot of experts.

His down-to-earth nature is perfectly captured in interactions like this phone call from his father:

Lewis: “Hello.”

Dad: “What’s happening?”

Lewis: “F*** all. What’s happening with you?”

Dad: “F*** all.”

Because Capaldi talks like this, doesn’t look like Harry Styles, has mental health issues and doesn’t think he’s very good at music, it’s easy to picture ourselves in his position. In a world in which it often feels like our agency over our own lives is steadily being eroded by forces beyond our control, that’s quite a nice feeling to have, even if it is only for 96 minutes.

Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now is streaming now on Netflix.