“How do you talk about memories? How do you describe a life which keeps slipping through your hands like sand?”. These are the words spoken by a vulnerable Peter Doherty at the beginning of the documentary made by the British rockstar’s current wife, Katia de Vidas, Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin, which is screening in Florence’s Festival dei Popoli following its debut in the Zurich Film Festival. From an uncontrollable explosion of creativity through to his descent into the hell of drug addition, the co-frontman of The Libertines lays himself bare in this film, which is often brutal and direct.

Katia de Vidas first shot Pete in November 2006, during a Babyshambles concert in Paris. Over the course of the following ten or so years, she shot more than 200 hours of footage. The director alternates sweat-drenched concert performances – the "need for chaos and frenzy", feeding into his exhibitionist tendencies, which accompanied the rise, fall and reunion of The Libertines – with private moments, where Peter is in a state of stupor (during a flight to Japan, he was hit by heroin withdrawal and finally realised that he was a drug addict), uttering poetic and existential but also slightly incoherent phrases. But she also offers up the narrative bridges that we need, voice-overs from Doherty as he is today and testimonials from those who were close to him professionally in those years. Like Mick Jones of The Clash, who produced The Libertines’ first two albums and who speaks of “young lion cubs” and “enormous pressure”. Doherty was the prime focus of notoriously devastating tabloid attention for the duration of the Noughties, especially during his relationship with Kate Moss.

A lover of literature since childhood, we see Peter as he talks about happiness, as he paints his pictures (collages of newspaper cuttings, splashes and brightly-coloured brushstrokes, faces without features), as he visits the “Crime and Punishment” exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and reads Baudelaire’s sentence “Dans le Mal se trouve toute volupté”, as he sets fire to his living room with lighter fluid or as he’s shooting up, the film not sparing us the sight of the black tourniquet constricting his arm or the needle as it’s about to enter his flesh; when he travels to Lisbon to get an opioid blocking implant fitted and to Hope Rehab in Thailand, which he leaves clean and ready to record his third album with The Libertines, Anthems For Doomed Youth. A happy ending would now require him to stay away from gear and focus on his new band Peter Doherty & The Puta Madres, not to mention a fourth album with The Libertines due for release in March 2024.

The question, however, is whether this documentary is aimed solely at fans of Pete or at a wider audience as a warning to stay away from addictive substances and to encourage empathy with our protagonist. It’s definitely a documentary snapshot of the black hole created in the relationship between creative process and wild popularity, which perpetuates the old cliché of the intense and messy lives lived by celebrities and their resulting fragility. Given the many videos on YouTube streamed directly from Pete in his bathtub and his memoir A Likely Lad, whose most explicit sections were amended by legal advisors, it feels like too much is left out of this documentary: his friendship with Peter Wolfe, the circumstances surrounding the death of Robyn Whitehead, his incredibly close connection with Amy Winehouse and his depression following her death, his relationship with his strict ex-army father and his relationship with Katia de Vidas herself.

Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin is co-produced by France and the UK by way of Wendy Production and Federation Studios. The Festival Agency (TFA) are managing international sales, with the film set for release in the UK today, 9 November, via Piece of Magic, and in 13 other countries around the world in the same month via Pathé Live (showing times can be found here).