Peter Hoskin

20,000 Days On Earth: is Nick Cave the missing link? Or the next stage in evolution?

This surreal biopic of the punkish Australian musician is domestic life as Kubrick would have shot it

Inspired by Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never (2011), Katy Perry’s Part of Me (2012) and One Direction’s This Is Us (2013), Nick Cave has released a documentary about himself. No doubt he wanted to prove that this old dog has new tricks. The whole movie is shot in candy-crushed 3D to appeal to the emteevee-ohmigod generation. He talks about how great it was to work with Rihanna and Ludacris: ‘The thing about thoseguys is…’

Nah, sorry, I’m just kidding with you. None of that is true, apart from the bit about Nick Cave releasing a documentary about himself. It’s called 20,000 Days on Earth. And, much like the man himself, it is gloriously oblique. It takes place — apparently — over the course of a day spent recording his last album with the Bad Seeds, Push the Sky Away. But it stretches those 24 hours beyond their normal bounds and into weird areas of space-time. There’s concert footage and Nabokov and psychiatry and Ray Winstone. This is not one for the Belieber in your family.

How familiar are you with Cave? If you want the basics about this punkish Australian musician, turned novelist and screenwriter and more, then you could always just ‘google it’, as he likes to say. But even that’s not necessary for watching 20,000 Days on Earth. The 20,000 days of the title are those that, by his own calculations, Cave has spent in existence. A rat-a-tat credits sequence alights on all of the main points: the bands, the heroin abuse, the infatuation with Elvis etc.

Yet all that really matters is that Cave is intensely cinematic. The first scene of the movie has him rising from bed and padding to the bathroom mirror. He stares at himself.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in