Movie Blog: '20,000 Days On Earth' Review

Nick Cave, the legendary musician and writer, who was frontman of the post-punk band The Birthday Party and currently leads Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is the beating, bleeding, open heart of 20,000 Days on Earth, a film so full of strange set pieces that it feels wrong to call it a documentary. What visual artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have made here feels more like a weird moving portrait than a this-happened-that-happened project chasing after truth in music history.

And that's fine. The great director Werner Herzog has often said that truth in art, or in life, is more complicated than a series of numbers, or events, or statements of fact. To him, and likely to Cave, truth also has a poetry to it – one that's hard to describe but possible to detect. Forsyth and Pollard go after this poetic truth, this deeper look into Cave's creative life, through a series of conversations, which at times come off as too staged to be taken seriously, or just bloated with introspection. These dialogues take place in moodily-lit living rooms, cars, and at the dinner table, and they feature a range of people, from Cave's former bandmates to what seems to be his psychiatrist. The conversations tend to be on art, creativity, religion, performance and death. Early on, Cave reveals his deepest fear: losing his memory, not being able to make art, music, literature.

In a sense, this film is something to combat that. At one point, it morphs into a visual museum, where items from Cave's past are literally handled with white gloves. On occasion, one's eyes are more than ready to roll as Cave elaborates on his life or work (or sings in rambling, free flowing performances), but then he'll capture one's attention again by way of a joke, or a look that makes you wonder if he's pulling the wool over your eyes, in the way a magician or poet might. And this is what stands out of about Cave: He's a rock star as well as a poet. While he can come off as self-absorbed, he's also Whitmanesque, sounding his barbaric yap over the rooftops of the world. To see him do so is exhilarating, and Forsyth and Pollard, for the most part, provide him with a stoop high and stylish enough to make a great noise.

20,000 Days on Earth is playing at the St. Anthony Main Theatre starting Friday.