I would rather make out with an Ebola patient than listen to almost any musician talk about themselves for an hour-and-a-half. I used to think that musicians were fascinating, but, as I spiral toward age 40, I’ve wised up to the bitter truth. Most musicians are inarticulate empty vessels. Take the guitar out of their hands and you may as well be talking to a spinach salad for all of the unique insight you might get about anything. I’ve said this before, but you don’t have to be smart to make great music. Teenagers and barely awake drug addicts have made timeless music. Kanye West has made great music—so people say (never heard it, myself). A talent for music is similar to a talent for boxing or making good fish tacos. It’s a worthwhile thing, but it doesn’t require even basic literacy.
The only group dumber than musicians on average are the people who write reviews about musicians. For free, on their website. Late Thursday night while they snack on Pop Tarts.
Also, I think Nick Cave is one of the smart ones.
That’s why this is a good movie. It helps that Cave is also an author. He’s turned out novels and screenplays. He’s literate. Importantly, this means that he doesn’t need to prove that he’s smart. He has that seasoned writer’s gravity about him. The film, which purports to be a day in his life, depicts Cave as a disciplined artist who plows the fields everyday alone in a room, fingers at a keyboard, pounding out words when he’s not in the recording studio or bellowing his brains out on a concert stage. This is partly a documentary and partly not. It’s not fiction, but it does take liberties with how it draws out its subject—and it, pointedly, never hides its moments of artistic license. The scenes where Cave opens up to a psychiatrist are blatantly staged. The moments where Cave drives his car and the likes of Blixa Bargeld and Kylie Minogue suddenly appear in the other seats to reflect on their work with Cave are even more clearly so. Sprinkled throughout are a few thunderous performances from his live show.
And it’s all cool. Who needs a straight biography? That’s what Wikipedia is for. This film touches on Cave’s history, but it’s mostly concerned with his present. His body of work over nearly forty years is impressive, but what matters most here is that he’s still working. We spend a lot of time with him, but he retains his mystique. Rather than journalism, this film is its own piece of art. It’s picturesque and carefully made to avoid feeling like a documentary. If one sees this without knowing who Nick Cave is, they might even take him for a fictional character in a film about the creative process and the successful artist’s life.
When Cave speaks here, he talks to other people or to himself (via the staged psychiatric session), rather than to the film’s audience. He pushes no agenda. He seems to simply be along for the ride with directors Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s vision. Turns out it was a smart thing to do.