Forsyth & Pollard: 20 000 Days On Earth (2014)

Now that pretty much every major musical celebrity has an active Twitter, Instagram and Facebook presence, there’s something a little bit quaint about the idea of a music documentary, which is perhaps why the genre has tended to devolve into straight concert films (often amplified by some kind of post-cinematic flourish, such as Katy Perry’s 3D extravaganza Part of Me) or metafictive outings along the lines of Mistaken For Strangers, Tom Berninger’s anarchic anti-documentary about the National. In fact, online media has more or less usurped the role of the music documentary full stop, in its quest for ever more highly cultivated illusions of the musician’s immediacy and intimacy with their most dedicated and devoted fans, to the point where traditional musical documentary can seem overwhelmingly stylised, remote and antiquated by comparison. To its credit, then, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s documentary about Nick Cave’s 20 000^th day on earth doesn’t aim to outdo the latest wave of cultivated celebrity intimacy, but instead falls back upon a highly stylised, self-conscious version of Cave, imbuing him with just enough reserve to preclude the faux-intimacy, or apparently transparent intimacy, that social media tends to engender. To some extent, they’re assisted by Cave himself, who narrates the film in an extended interior monologue that alternately feels like nascent song lyrics, novels or reflections for his next session with his psychotherapist, whose sessions anchor the rambling, ruminative drive around Cave's adopted home town of Brighton that makes up the film. As Cave’s day takes him in and out of his memories and reflections, he’s visited by a whole host of figures from his past and present, including Ray Winstone, Kylie Minogue and Mick Harvey, as he reflects back over a life driven, like the film itself, by counterpoint: “putting disparate elements together and seeing which way the sparks fly.” Within that ceaseless contrapuntal ebb and flow, Cave’s verbosity feels like a drive towards self-annihilation, as he circles around a past that becomes ever more indistinguishable from the mythologies he’s created about it, until watching him is a bit like witnessing a musician at the very peak of a transcendent live performance – the only moments in his life, Cave observes, when he can really forget who he is, and the moments he lives for. As a result, Cave never quite feels present, or, when he is present, the world around him seems to dim as Brighton recedes to a low-tide murmur, haunted by picaresque echoes and carnival memories that are not its own. Against that backdrop, Cave feels more mystic, but also more laconic, more Australian in the way he settles into his visions, his taste for how the unpretentious, vernacular observation can speak multitudes. By the end, it feels more like we’ve visited the outer limits of Cave than Cave per se, the places where he has to collaborate or else discover the end of himself, “the feeling of a song before you understand it…wild and unbroken, when the song is still clear.” And that makes it feel right - but also poignant - that the recording sessions for Push The Sky Away hover around the fringes and comprise the soundtrack, since, as the first Bad Seeds album recorded without Warren Ellis' lyrical touch, it haunts the film with an inchoate sense of Cave's incompleteness, the shifting point at which his nightmares end and something softer and capable of satiating them begins.