Nick Cave's Documentary "This Much I Know To Be True" (Directed by Andrew Dominik, 2022)

I hate Nick Cave because of the Andrew Dominik documentary This Much I Know To Be True. Before I saw this film, I liked him. But I started having doubts when he began to write his semi-regular column, The Red Hand Files. As he gets older, he becomes more of a commercial Saint. Or become a character like Miss Lonelyhearts by the great novelist Nathanael West. Miss Lonelyhearts is a pitch-black comedy, but it’s not a colossal laugh session, but biting humor that sticks to the reader. Unlike the novella, Cave left the humor in the other world. Cave is now answering his fan’s letters for advice and asking for his guidance for a better or complete life. Perhaps he’s connecting their pain to his art or the other way around? Nick used to use poison in his art, but now the poison is using the artist.

This Much I Know To Be True is serious. The film starts well by showing Nick’s work with ceramics, in which he makes a series of small statues of the Devil throughout his life. Cave has always been fascinated with the landscape of religious or mythological beings. In essence, I think Cave identifies with these figures. Often the artist (or egotist) uses the pain in their life and magnifies it as a theatrical presentation. Not only does the artist feel it, but he can share the pain with their audience.

I make a point of staying through a film even if I don’t like it. Once you buy the ticket, you give up your time for the artist, no matter how great or horrific the experience is. At times, This Much I Know To Be True is like the Peter Jackson/Michael Lindsay-Hogg film Get Back/Let it Be, where you see the artist struggling to come to terms with their work, but mainly because of Covid, it’s a studio-only concert for a film/TV/stay-at-home audience. Like Jean-Luc Godard’s great Sympathy For The Devil, where he built tracks surrounding the Rolling Stones as they struggled with the title song. The Godard film captures boredom, inspiration, and the mechanics of working on something together or not. Dominik uses the same technique, but it comes off with feelings of vertigo. The set pieces are eye candy, but it is never more than that. Cave always had the tone of a moralist, but his early songs and The Bad Seeds were enforceable, sexual, violent, and technicolored mythology that is old and long as Rock n’ Roll history. It’s Robert Mitchum with both hands tattooed “love” and “hate.” But now Nick Cave is a less complex artist. At least visually and symbolically.

Nick Cave can sing the words of a page, which alone can be something. He’s been a magnificent vocalist from the beginning of his career with the Birthday Party and beyond, and the aging process has even made him a better singer. I’m one of those who like the voices of youth turning into old age. Cave is a much better vocalist now than in his past. The musicianship with whoever he’s working with is always top-notch. So he’s the real deal, he can write and sing, but his public image is irritating.

The Nick documentaries are very much self-promotion for his records and career. That is the goal of Dominik’s film. They’re not documentaries but set pieces to show off Cave as a caring and, of course, a creative genius of sorts. When I hear his last album with Warren Ellis Carnage, it’s very different from his older recordings. It’s more lyrically direct, and the music, although harsh in parts, is mostly pretty. Nick admires Elvis in his Las Vegas years when he was on the way out, burned, drugged, and approaching his end without a map. The music Elvis made at the time had true desperation, but listening to Cave and Ellis’s later albums, this is not the route for Nick. And he’s using a map to measure his steps to success or heaven. Perhaps the same to him.