The singer-songwriter (and novelist and screenwriter) Nick Cave is a longtime chronicler of dread, erotic obsession, morality and mortality. The director Andrew Dominik, not precisely a screwball comedy man himself (“Killing Them Softly”), proved an apt collaborator with Cave on the 2016 documentary “One Extra Time With Feeling.”
That movie was a tough proposition, undertaken within the wake of the 2015 loss of life of Cave’s teenage son Arthur. It documented the making of “Skeleton Tree,” considered one of Cave and his band the Unhealthy Seeds’ most transferring data.
The brand new “This A lot I Know to Be True,” shot in spring 2021 earlier than a tour, and largely dedicated to presenting songs from the latest albums “Ghosteen” and “Carnage,” is a lighter affair. It opens with Cave talking about how he dealt with the pandemic: “I took the federal government’s recommendation,” he says, pausing to chuckle, “and retrained as a ceramicist.” He then exhibits off sculptures depicting a historical past of the satan.
Cave’s companion in music, the multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, is the opposite most important presence right here. (Marianne Faithfull, a stalwart buddy of Cave’s, pops in for a memorable scene.) Cave waxes droll on their collaboration: “He took a subordinate function of embellishing what was occurring,” he says of Ellis, including, “And slowly, one after the other, taking out every member of the Unhealthy Seeds. I do know I’m the following to go.” Extra critically, he talks concerning the Pink Hand Information, his publication, a form of metaphysical recommendation column, during which he workout routines a compassion that he admits “doesn’t come naturally.”
Dominik exhibits off his personal ingenious playfulness right here. He shifts side ratios from shot to shot. He lays naked cinematic contrivances by exhibiting dolly tracks in a shot, solely then to pretend out the viewer with a lighting trick. A relatively enjoyable Nick Cave film won’t have been in your 2022 bingo card, however right here we’re.
This A lot I Know to Be True
Not rated. Operating time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Mubi.
