Nick Cave is a big blind spot for me.
I kind of pushed his solo music aside for a long time. I was a big fan of his original band, The Birthday Party, which is about as feral and frightening as rock music can get, and I just didn't think of Cave as being this somber balladeer. I had also seen him in concert twenty five years ago at a festival when I was quite young, and I just remember thinking 'who's this old bore', as stupid teens are sometimes known to do when they aren't getting punched in the face by music.
But the pandemic kind of got me exploring his stuff and now I'm in deep. He's a fairly easy sell for those who like similarly minded artists like Leonard Cohen (introspective, sad, lonesome, poetic yet still iconoclastic music). But he's definitely still very dark and is rarely very feel good in his effect. Still, frequently very beautiful stuff though.
For those who can't get on board his music though, only about half of this (maybe even less) is songs. The rest is interviews and fly on the wall moments, almost exclusively revolving around the tragedy that had recently happened in Cave's life (the death of his son). The film wrestles with the idea of what a person, particularly in this case a creative person, does when something like this happens. And, while it always keeps on a brave face, and it never goes into any kind of full on emotional breakdown, there is just this enormous weight that lives on top of the movie. And, as the movie keeps probing, I've seen few films that talk as eloquently and movingly and frighteningly on what these kinds of moments do to a person. And how everything they do afterwards becomes shaped by it.