Like all musicians in 2021, Nick Cave was unable to connect with his audience in person. He uses this concert film to break the vocal and instrumental silence, talk about himself and perform songs from “Ghosteen” and “Carnage”, with help from Warren Ellis.
Quite a bit of This Much I Know to Be True happens in a soundstage. Inside that soundstage is what can be described as a literal circle of light. Within that circle, Nick Cave is the somewhat reluctant center of attention.
Reluctant because even though it’s Cave’s face on the poster, the film aims to capture the work of a partnership whose other half is Warren Ellis. On paper, it’s not an equal association; Cave writes the lyrics and co-writes the music, plays keyboards, and sings lead vocals — he’s the clean shaven face of whichever collective he and Ellis are part at any given time (either the Bad Seeds, Grinderman, or as a duo), while the scraggly Ellis hovers around Cave like a satellite.
Except that the multi-instrumentalist Ellis does a lot more than hover around, and perhaps a tacit goal of this documentary is to pay some well deserved attention to Ellis’s role(s) in the band — and this is a part of the spotlight that Cave surely does not begrudge.
Cave is the antithesis of a rockstar — an unassuming intellectual that sees himself as "as a person ... As a husband, and father, and friend, and citizen that makes music and writes stuff," as opposed to a performer first and foremost, although he remains a born entertainer as well as a mesmerizing raconteur.
Cave hasn’t aged a day in the eight years since 20,000 Days on Earth (I have yet to watch 2016’s One More Time with Feeling). He seems to have found the Fountain of Eternal Sinewy Wiriness (guest artist Marianne Faithfull, on the other hand, somehow looks bloated and brittle at the same time, which is bad, though her voice is as raggedy — if not more — as ever, which is good). Equally intact are his restless spirit, animal magnetism, and seemingly endless charisma.
Now, This Much... is a follow-up to Once More..., both directed by Andrew Dominik. 20,000 Days... had a different director with a different approach (and is brilliant in its own right), and yet there is a progression here that can be traced all the way back to 20,000 Days...
In that movie, Cave espoused a songwriting philosophy that went from the dyonisian to the apollonian — from chaos and anarchy to an aesthetically pleasing, though by no means conventional, organized structure. In This Much..., this creative process, this artistic method, becomes an encompassing worldview.
