20,000 Days on Earth

Most music docs chop up concert footage, edit in screaming fans and call it a day. Far too often, it feels like you’re watching the exact same film, only recast with different bands. But 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH, about apocalyptic rock poet Nick Cave, is something very different. The filmmakers and Cave create staged scenarios, in which Cave improvises naturally, that explain his creative process.
He’s shot driving in a car three times: with tough-guy English actor Ray Winstone in the passenger seat, Australian singer Kylie Minogue in the backseat, and former bandmate Blixa Bargeld explaining why he left the Bad Seeds. Along the way, Cave – not just a songwriter, but a novelist and screenwriter too – reveals himself as a consummate aphorist, coining lines like, “your limitations make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are.” Instead of revealing the private life of a public icon, 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH magnifies Cave’s mythology into something stranger – and more elemental. “Being on stage meant I got to be that person I always wanted to be”, he says at one point in the film. “Then, you look down into the front row, and someone yawns.” (Logan Hill)