One More Time with Feeling

I'm not really a Nick Cave fan. I really liked Where the Wild Roses Grow (the hit from 1995) and have heard some other stuff that's nice, but I don't think I've ever listened to a full Nick Cave album. My girlfriend dragged me to this movie, and I'm glad she did.

I had totally forgotten what happened (read about it in the news last year), so it was a little bit confusing when he/they talked about the trauma in the first half of the movie. But it was soon apparent that he had lost someone close to him, which made everything make sense.

It is a depressing documentary. But if you only want to see happy things, go watch the Police Academy series or some other uncomplicated movie. This documentary will make you think, and fear losing people close to you (especially if you're a parent). Also, I'm not a movie buff, and don't know all the terms. But the cinematic whatever-it's- called (position and movement of the camera) was great. The director really managed to capture what Nick said, tried to say, and didn't say. I saw the 2D version of the movie, I can imagine that some scenes would have had even more of an impact in 3D, but this was more than good enough.

Finally, the music was great. Nothing like the upbeat and funny Nick Cave-songs I've heard before, but still great. If I didn't have the album on Spotify already, this would have been my first Nick Cave album.

Nick Cave reflects on the challenges of making new songs with age and tauma nit giving space to imagination; he ponders the natire of his music and why writes songs. The creative process is shown by introducig us to the team, Warren particularly and through several cool performances. Nice doc.

I watched this recently and was hugely moved by it. One of the best documentaries on one of the finest artists of the last ten years.

It works brilliantly as a companion piece to the earlier Nick Cave documentary; 20000 days on earth, an equally visceral and beautifully crafted film. Why isn't this man awarded the accolades he so rightfully deserves.

Moving, gripping and artful. Highly reccomended and essential viewing for anyone who has the slightest interest in music docs, or the process of creation.

The premiere of 20,000 Days on Earth, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's 2014 documentary about musician and author Nick Cave, was preceded by red carpet pizazz, and the irreverent film itself ended – beside the sea – with an optimistic message of boundless hope and creativity.

It's these memories that make Andrew Dominik's mesmeric new documentary even sadder. We're used to seeing the elegant, lyrical Cave effortlessly turning horror into romance. But here we see him slouched in a tracksuit top, unsure what to say or do to console his grieving wife, who clutches a painting that their son, Arthur, drew when he was five.

Our knowledge of the fate of Arthur Cave, who fell to his death last year aged 15, is assumed and it looms over the film like a literal shadow. Shot almost entirely in monochrome, the mood is mournful throughout, punctuated by the briefest levity, usually between Cave and Warren Ellis, his long-time collaborator.

The film makes few narrative concessions. There's no dramatic moment when the bad news comes through. No crash zooms on crying faces. Early on, Cave reflects on something Ellis has said: that past, present and future exist all at once. And this is how it feels in the final edit, as we never know which footage (if any) is from before the tragedy and which came after.

We are given no names in subtitles and the context is barely explained. It's not informative in the typical sense. This isn't a criticism but a fact. Rather than a charting of specific events, One More Time With Feeling is a document of mood and emotion. Punctuating this texture are studio recordings. The tracks from The Bad Seeds' new LP, Skeleton Tree, released the day after this one- off cinematic event, are universally downbeat: looping, suffocating, darkly ambient swirls and tragic piano descents. More than ever, the lyrics are aching and sometimes abstract. Cave is the master of effective verbal repetition; and, as he mentions at one point, no line is wasted. Dominik lets four or five tracks play out in full while his camera prowls the moody studio darkness. His direction is tasteful, atmospheric, and sensitive.

And necessarily so, because the feelings are raw. Cave talks unbearably movingly about the impossibility of softening his grief with lyrics. (I was reminded of Theodor Adorno's comment about how there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.) He's also coming to terms with the fact that the trauma cannot be escaped, such is its "elastic" grasp, always pulling the bereaved back. However eloquently Cave has sung or spoken about death and loss in the past, the situation here is obviously something profound and unique, and the aftermath is a maze of indefinable despair, beyond the best poet.

Watch with caution, for this is a difficult documentary which is not designed to console or comfort. It exists to draw you unsentimentally into the sombre rhythm of grief. Yet the fact that a perfectly calibrated and deeply moving work of art could come out of such a moment in an artist's life does, on some level, leave us with a kind of hope.

To call One More Time With Feeling a great achievement and leave it at that would be to ignore just how unique it is in a vast sea of documentaries. Instead of being about the death of Nick Cave's son and treating that as the primary subject, the film revolves around Nick Cave's creative process and in the meantime how his personal loss affected that process. There are a lot of philosophical ideas going around, so even though the premise and structure of the film is simple, it's a very weight film to experience. Andrew Dominik can create an atmosphere like no other (for an example, see The Assassination of Jesse James) and here he's able to so perfectly capture the kind of thoughtful ideas and imagery that are associated with Cave's internal process. This is a great one and not to be missed.