At the beginning of This Much I Know to Be True Nick Cave shows us a series of ceramic figurines that depict the life and death of the devil. Cave (64) made them himself. During the corona pandemic, he trained himself as a ceramist, he says.
He has to search for words for one cult pure: a child who reaches out to the devil and forgives. You can feel it immediately: the ghost of Arthur haunts the room, Cave’s son who died in 2015 at the age of 15 when he fell from a cliff near Brighton.
Arthur’s name is never mentioned. The hundred minutes that follow are more concert film than documentary. Yet you feel that Arthur plays a role here and that his father feels the same. Nick Cave has always sung about death and loss, but all the words he has devoted to it since 2015 have an urgency that no listener can escape. If the movie has one message, it’s that.
Director Andrew Dominik previously made One More Time with Feeling (2016). That was really a documentary, about Cave as a grieving father, impossible to sit with dry eyes.
This Much I Know to Be True is a kind of sequel, with very little spoken word and a lot of music: beautifully filmed live performances in an abandoned ballroom, of songs by Ghosteen (2019) and carnage (2021), the two albums Cave has made since Arthur’s death.
Dominik’s second Cave film is primarily an ode to the magic that occurs when Cave and his Bad Seeds blood brother Warren Ellis make music together, whether in a bare-bones song like Spinning Song is, or takes the form of a sound hurricane, with top heavy band and strobe light, as in White Elephant†
In between, the frail old Marianne Faithfull, with a tube in her nose for extra oxygen, stops by to recite a poem, a tender climax in the film.
Another highlight is the passage on arguably Cave’s most notable activity since Arthur’s death: his blog The Red Hand Fileswhere he answers questions (often deeply personal from distressed fans) with empathy and angelic patience in beautiful prose.
‘I take the time for those questions. If I answered quickly, I wouldn’t do it from the best part of my nature. That is the value of The Red Hand Files: The questions force me to keep in touch with the best part of my character. That doesn’t come naturally to me.’
During such passages you have to sigh that This Much I Know to Be Trueno matter how masterly the music is, it could have been a little more documentary.
This Much I Know to Be True
Documentary/concert film
Directed by Andrew Dominic.
101 min., in more than 80 halls, from 11 to 15/5.