This Much I Know to Be True review – incandescent Nick Cave concert film

The last time Nick Cave placed himself in front of Andrew Dominik’s camera, it was for One More Time with Feeling, the release of which coincided with the Skeleton Tree album in 2016. Recorded in the aftermath of the death of Cave’s teenage son Arthur, that album/film double release was drowned in the deepest darkest depths of grief.

In the years since, Cave has repeatedly used films to shine a different angle of light on his musical work, especially as it has become more openly spiritual, reaching towards the truly transcendental. Even concerts film such as Distant Sky (covering the Skeleton Tree tour), and the pandemic-infused solo piano set Idiot Prayer are shot through with a desire to interrogate his own work and his relationship to the audience.

This Much I Know to Be True is ostensibly a document of rehearsals for Cave and Ellis’s UK tour of autumn last year, itself a very spiritual – if overpriced – live experience. But the camera work by Dominik and acclaimed cinematographer Robbie Ryan, as well as the elegant editing, suggests these are not rehearsals per se, but a very organised choreography designed for the audience, sending a knowing wink of its own artificiality.

In between are intercut brief interviews with Cave, Ellis, or a visiting Marianne Faithfull. These are often humorous and provide wonderful insight into the intense collaborative relationship between Cave and Ellis. But the shadow of loss still looms in the background, perhaps even more so given that the circle has repeated itself: the release of this film comes mere days after the death of Jethro Cave, another one of his sons.

The songs featured therein are cut from Cave’s two most recent albums, Ghosteen (with The Bad Seeds) Carnage (solely with Ellis), songs that continue the work of One More Time with Feeling. If Skeleton Tree captured a sense of unholy grieving in the wake of life-shaking loss, then the follow up album Ghosteen captured the earthly afterlife of acceptance: of a person’s world re-aligned and re-emerging but unmistakably changed. Carnage, in spite of its transcendental moments, still saw sparks of anger at the wider world, as if signalling an artist willing to come back to the physical realm once again.

As a result, there is a light and air to these performances – a shift away from the oppressive black-and-white look of One More Time with Feeling. They are both intimate and epic, with Ellis’s droning loops and the commandeering of string sections giving levity to Cave’s rumbling baritone, intoning lyrics that are evermore loose and incantatory, more like mantras than songs. Many of the performances contained here contain simple platitudes; “I love my baby and my baby loves me,” or even simpler; “And I love you” repeated ad infinitum. They are earned. It takes a hell of a lot of effort to make something this simple look so effortless.

There is a sequence where Cave reads out a letter from his Red Hand Files, where he often answers difficult and searching questions from people the world over. It is yet another mark of an artist consistently concerned with reaching out to an audience in a way that is open and naked, in a way that, quite frankly, invites ridicule and accusations of pretension. In the hands of a 20-something twerp who’s just been given a Best New Music sticker on Pitchfork, this would be truth. But in the hands of Nick Cave – and his very specific, nigh-religious relationship with his fans (of which I am one) – this results in something that is spiritually positive and nourishing in a way that only the deepest, most fanatical of artist-audience relationships are. Much like a cult, it looks frankly psychotic to those on the outside. But for those on the inside, it feels essential to life itself.

This Much I Know to Be True is released on MUBI on 8 July.