Yes, the spoon may symbolise Bowie's mid-1970s period of addiction to coke, a situation he mythologised with another in his series of personas, the Thin White Duke from the time of his album. But it is not a fitting symbol for the show as a whole.

"David Bowie Is" happens to be a lot of things, most of them very good: testament to the dogged effort that underlies most successful self-invention; compelling argument for the man's musical greatness; visit to funky grandpa's vintage high-end thrift store; nostalgia trip for teenagers of the 1960s and '70s; foundational material for the selfie era; the hippest lost episode of you could ever imagine; and pretty good rock'n'roll experience, thanks to liberal doses of Bowie music beamed in through the headphones that are issued upon entrance.

But it is not nearly as tough-minded about Bowie as the coke spoon would suggest.

The show was organised by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in tacit co-operation with Bowie - or at least with his well-stuffed archive, which he controls. Because the show celebrates Bowie rather than critiques him, it has nothing to say about the elephant in the exhibition's concluding rooms: the marked decline in the music he made from, arguably, 1983 on.

The show doesn't have much to say, either, about his surprise onstage announcement that he was disbanding his potent Ziggy Stardust-era band, led by guitarist Mick Ronson. We don't hear what the presumably stunned bandmates said about their public quasi-firing.

The exhibition's take is that Ziggy, character and band, was another persona the man had to shed, whatever the consequences. At the same time, it's clear that Bowie's constant moving on was a foundation of his excellence, the reason he made such memorable music in so many styles, all of them linked by his under-appreciated lyrical gifts and his sincerely experimental approach to the enterprise of being a rock star.

A quick, thoroughly incomplete refresher: between roughly 1970 and 1980, in albums that came at an astonishing pace by today's languid standards, Bowie delivered, at the highest level, everything from lounge music ( ) to grinding rock ( ) to soul ( ) to funk ( ) to post-cold war anthems ( ).

The show is very detailed about the early years, in which Bowie, born David Jones, speaks candidly about buying challenging jazz and literature to appear cool, and then learning to like them. He seems, at this point, determined mostly to become famous outside of the bourgeois norms of the advertising career he rejected.

"I wanted to be well-known. I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas," he says in a clip in the first room.

Bowie tried his hand at mime. At age 17, a news clip shows us, he started and spoke on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. He wrote a manifesto. But he also kept writing songs and performing them through a succession of bands such as The Konrads, the Delta Lemons and Dave and the Bowmen. He put himself out there, over and over, until at last people paid attention.

And then come the crowning moments that turned him from a wannabe into an is: the popular success of , when Bowie was still more of a folkie, followed by the shock of his appearance on the TV show singing in the persona of Ziggy Stardust. Not every young Brit saw Bowie sing on national TV, but the ones who really saw it seemed to have gone on to form bands. "David Bowie Is" offers all of that performance. The cotton candy-coloured costume he wore that day is perched in front of the screen.

In another room, more deft stagecraft: the presentation of a series of Bowie's music videos on vintage TV sets. On a modern flat-screen, they might look dated. These pieces of equipment bring you closer to the original moment.

The Chicago museum has made some tweaks to the show, which has been in London, Toronto, Brazil and Berlin before. The MCA presents a whole song, rather than just a sample, from his 1979 appearance because of its special relevance in the US. The MCA also orders the show mostly chronologically, rather than in the original manner, thematically.

The coming-to-fame story is the exciting part for most artists, who then settle in to what they will remain, more or less. But Bowie kept changing, and this show is not as erudite as it ought to be on the evolution in his music. It documents the shifts better than it explains them, and it provides only brief nods to key collaborators, such as Ronson, early on, and Brian Eno and Iggy Pop in the Berlin era of the late 1970s, where Bowie went in part to kick cocaine.

The show seems overly self-conscious about trying to justify its presence in art museums. So we get Bowie's paintings and his sketches of concert lighting schemes, as well as his storyboards for a movie set in "Hunger City".

And we get the stage outfits - lots and lots of stage outfits. They're fun, for the most part, and certainly help make the case for Bowie as a gutsy, first-wave gender bender. But you can feel the curators straining at times. The overview pieces at each new section sometimes slip into sweeping generalisation and hype.

Amid the few misfires, however, there are scores of moments that are terrific: "Tissue blotted with Bowie's lipstick, 1974", for instance, or "Letter confirming the stage name David Bowie, 1965" or even the coke spoon. His apartment keys from Berlin hang on a wall, proof that Bowie held on to everything.

Just as the show begins losing steam comes the room that delivers a fresh jolt of electricity. In a big, open, almost concert hall setting, it shows footage of vintage Bowie performances as you hear the music pulsing around you, this time with your headphones off.

Soaking in those performances, you have time to think about what you've seen. "David Bowie Is", ultimately, is a show about projecting oneself onto society's canvas, a defining modern art form.

There's an overwhelming case here for Bowie, the totality of Bowie during his most fertile period, as one of the greatest performance art pieces we're likely to see.