This Much I Know to Be True (2022)

Directed by: Andrew Dominik | 106 minutes | documentary, music | Starring: Nick Cave, Earl Cave, Andrew Dominik, Warren Ellis, Marianne Faithfull

‘This Much I Know To Be True’ is not the first documentary about Nick Cave. This artist is being followed perhaps for the fourth time in recent years; by film director Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”) for the second time after the acclaimed mourning document “One More Time With Feeling” from 2016.

‘This Much I Know To Be True’ is about the collaboration between Cave and the Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis. Ellis and Cave have already worked together on the soundtracks of the aforementioned ‘The Assassination’ and the recent ‘Blonde’ – a biopic of Dominik about Marilyn Monroe. An artistic bubble, that’s what we’re looking at here.

It is an intimate bubble – not your average talking head documentary. Every now and then the sacred atmosphere of the music recordings is interrupted by conversations, for example with the cooperating Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull (treated for COVID-19 in combination with pneumonia) has a catheter in her nose, while sharing black humor with the two musicians.

Dominik creates an atmosphere of dying and mourning, an atmosphere that fits Cave’s music anyway and has only been deepened in recent years by the death of his son. You can also overload that with sentiment, but Reverend Cave and shaman Ellis are exorcising death with art, and that is understood.

Dominik is not only an admirer, he writes. The making process of the death charms must be seen. That can also become tacky, art for the artists – or a repetition exercise, but it won’t be. Cave is too internally driven to get involved with fanboys. He dares to allow intimates, and that’s nice. And art like his offers comfort. Death will come anyway.