I went to see the Nick Cave film on Monday evening. Though I've never been a huge fan of his music or previously of his persona, I thought it was just superb and it's been rattling round my head ever since. It's compelling from beginning to end, managing to make life seem larger than we're generally able to imagine it and somehow also represent it as deeply, fundamentally important, a matter of life or death even. That's a realisation it's easy to lose sight of and it's generally art as much as life itself that brings that fact back to us.
Much of the film focusses upon the most fundamental subject of all, the sensation of being alive itself, much else of it on something almost equally interesting, the act of creating of art, and manages to say something actually worth saying about it without being precious which is actually pretty rare. A beautifully crafted and shot piece of work. Here's a review from The New York Times which sums it up pretty well, though I'd question whether to say he once flirted with Christianity is an accurate depiction of the anecdote Cave tells during the film. Otherwise, although slightly descriptive, (possibly because he's not hugely well-known in the States), rather than actually a review, it focuses on many of the main themes represented. I couldn't recommend the film more highly! It's also led me to listen to Cave & the Bad Seeds current album and really rate bits of it which I'd never have seen coming.
In ‘20,000 Days on Earth,’ Nick Cave Is on the Move
“Memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive are tied up in memory.”
So observes the dour songwriter Nick Cave during an interview with the noted British psychoanalyst Darian Leader, in “20,000 Days on Earth.” The film, a fusion of documentary and drama directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, is a fictional re-creation of the 20,000th day of Mr. Cave’s life, when he started recording his 2013 album, “Push the Sky Away.” It is as intimate and honest a portrait of a rock artist’s creative roots as any film has attempted.
The pervasive mood is a brooding hyperawareness of time and the brevity of existence. Sensationalism and salaciousness are minimal. Mr. Cave’s onetime heroin addiction is mentioned but only in the context of Christianity, with which Mr. Cave, when asked about religion, says he flirted with during that period. Adolescent sexual experiences are mentioned but not graphically described.
What Mr. Cave fears most, he muses to the doctor, is losing his memory. He knows that for any writer, memory is the source of creativity and the seat of identity. His narrative songs, he says, constitute a whole world created out of “those original precious memories that define our lives: memories that we spend forever chasing after.”
Sooner or later, he might have added, a writer must also confront the uncomfortable reality that everything he puts down on paper comes out of his own head and no one else’s. Even if the words are borrowed, they are still chosen. The film awakens a queasy awareness that there is no escaping from the self.
Mr. Cave is matter of fact about the ruthlessness of the creative process, confessing to “cannibalizing” his marriage to Susie Bick, the British model he wed in 1999, and to “tormenting” her. (Ms. Bick is barely glimpsed during the film.) In the movie’s most emotionally extravagant outburst, he rhapsodizes about their first meeting while we see a montage of legendary beauties. No other major relationships are mentioned.
Mr. Cave, who will turn 57 on Monday, was born in Australia and now lives in Brighton, England, where the turbulent weather reflects his churning, gothic musical melancholy. The film opens with a spectacular three-minute montage in which streams of images from his life are clocked as a counter speeds to the number 20,000, after which Mr. Cave is shown waking up in the morning on that magic day.
He drives around Brighton in a car, in which various collaborators and friends materialize. One is the actor Ray Winstone from the 2005 film “The Proposition,” whose screenplay Mr. Cave wrote. Others include Blixa Bargeld, a former guitarist with his band the Bad Seeds, and the Australian pop star Kylie Minogue, with whom he had his only major hit, “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” from his “Murder Ballads” album in the mid-’90s.
He visits his archive and sorts through memorabilia and drops in on Warren Ellis, a songwriting collaborator and band mate. They share memories of attending revelatory concerts by Nina Simone and Jerry Lee Lewis. Reflecting on his childhood artistic inclinations, Mr. Cave suggests that his father’s reading him the first chapter of “Lolita” helped set him on his path. The grown-up Mr. Cave belongs to rock’s poète maudit tradition of Jim Morrison, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. But despite a large following in Europe, he is not well known in the United States beyond a small, fervent following.
Despite snatches of songs here and there, it is not until the end that the film bursts into a flood of music with a symphonic performance by Mr. Cave and the Bad Seeds at the Sydney Opera House: a grandiloquent finale in which his agonized introspection finds transcendent release.
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