This Much I Know to Be True Review: Try a Little Unorthodox Tenderness

In One More Time with Feeling, Andrew Dominik’s 2016 documentary about the making of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’s 16th studio album, Skeleton Tree, one felt two artists waging what Martin Amis might call an urgent, agonizing war against cliché. Cave’s 15-year-old son, Arthur, had died the year before and that calamity, which goes largely unspoken, courses throughout the documentary, as both Dominik and Cave viscerally communicate a sense of missingness, avoiding useless platitudes about death and rebirth.

Cave carries his grief with an achingly sparse dignity, exuding the unknowability of loss, even by himself—a principle that’s animated several Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds albums over recent years, especially the astonishing Ghosteen. Age and pain have lent Cave the prophetic air of one of his heroes, Leonard Cohen, and Dominik honors his iconography. A follow-up to this singularly personal film-slash-artifact seems not only unnecessary but impossible.

Dominik’s This Much I Know to be True has a more familiar shape than its predecessor, though it’s no less moving. Where One More Time with Feeling riffed unconventionally on the behind-the-scenes template that drives many rock documentaries, This Much I Know to Be True broadly functions as a concert film. Cave and frequent collaborator Warren Ellis and an assortment of musicians perform songs from Ghosteen and Carnage in an abandoned Bristol factory space that’s been made up to resemble a blend of a church with a farmhouse ballroom.

There’s less talking in This Much I Know to Be True, as Dominik lingers on Cave and Ellis’s process of shaping songs. Still, Cave isn’t beyond taking the occasional piss. He drolly describes Ellis as being on “transmit” more than “receive” and says that writing a traditional song is pointless at this juncture in their partnership. They doodle. They rely on instinct. They fine-tune until nothing becomes something. Nevertheless, the final form of the songs evince considerable artistic control as well as a much-sought-after catharsis.

Given his deep baritone voice, his tall and lean western-movie-outlaw frame, and his penchant for abstract lyrics and religious imagery, it would be natural to produce a Cave documentary that’s heavy on woo-woo hero worship. Dominik conveys awe of Cave, while eliding the pompous rocker horseshit that flows through even great concert films like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. Art-making isn’t mystified in either One More Time with Feeling or This Much I Know to Be True, but shown to be work—part team management, prospecting, writing, and performing—that occasionally yields rewards. Cave speaks of the “lot of terrible shit” that he and Ellis produce and must then parse through, and we see the toil of their experiments at fascinating length, as well as the fruit that’s born via the concert sequences.

One of This Much I Know to Be True’s greatest sequences involves the production of one of Ghosteen’s most painfully beautiful songs, “Waiting for You.” In an early take, Cave and Ellis’s rendition of the number sounds strained, with Ellis’s synth competing with Cave’s voice. After all their fine-tuning, they land on the ineffable longing that drives the song. In such scenes, of which there are many of comparable texture across This Much I Know to Be True, Dominik achieves the best of both worlds, showing viewers the process of creation and collaboration without attempting to explain art into literal-minded meaninglessness.

This Much I Know to Be True is an emotional sequel to One More Time with Feeling, revealing how Cave’s grief has aged into grace. He accepts unhappiness as an element of everyday affairs, as we all must if we are to mature. Correspondingly, the spare black-and-white imagery of the first film has been traded in for ecstatic colors that embody a re-initiation into collaboration. And one of One More Time with Feeling’s most optimistic visual tricks, in which cameras swirl around on tracks, allowing us to seemingly float along with the musicians on the embers of their songs, becomes a dominant motif in This Much I Know to Be True.

As in The Last Waltz, the swirling cameras suggest camaraderie, emphasizing the democracy of each instrument being afforded an opportunity to shine. In this context, an image of a young woman playing a violin, adding her light to Cave and Ellis’s obsessive soundscapes, is transcendentally poignant. Dominik includes his filmmaking team in this reverie, as the tracks circle in on themselves, allowing cameras and camera people to momentarily catch one another as they weave in and out of tableaux that serve to unite virtually all art forms.

The accumulating effect of these formal devices, coupled with the piercing fragments of Cave’s lyrics and Ellis’s swooning instrumentation, is that of a heartbroken artist learning to reengage with society. Viewers, though, are allowed to discern that message for themselves across This Much I Know to Be True, visually and aurally, in concert sequences as well as in standalone scenes, such as the opening, in which Cave explains a series of porcelain figures that he’s forged. The Devil is the star of each sculpture, and Cave treats him as a fallen human rather than a consuming force of malevolence, granting him forgiveness.

This Much I Know to Be True honors the unorthodox tenderness of a great musician’s late work, as well as its sense of freewheeling inventiveness. One can float around in the film, just as in Dominik’s fictional features (Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Killing Them Softly), which are less about spinning narratives than sustaining moods of hallucinatory existentialism. One could call them visual albums, and so it’s not such a shock that Dominik has made two superbly airy and resonant concert films. That’s because he’s as willing as Cave to walk out into the wasteland of free-association, accepting the risk of ludicrousness, or, more precisely, of vulnerability.