Doherty’s wife’s intimate, up-close-and-personal film about the star’s messy relationship with hard drugs might be lacking in analysis – but the genuine soul-baring is captivating
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.
