‘This Much I Know to Be True’ Review: Andrew Dominik’s Hypnotic and Haunting Nick Cave Performance Documentary

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang Two cameras orbit a grand piano on a circular track. Sometimes one will catch sight of the other, passing behind the black-haired singer at the keyboard, flashing between the session violinists or gliding beyond the bearded man crouched low over his synthesizer.

Though this visible stagecraft draws attention to the fabrication — stage lights pop; grips wander through, adjusting the wiring — somehow the effect of Andrew Dominik’s “This Much I Know to Be True” is floaty, disembodied, hypnotic.

Illuminating tracks from the superb 2019 Bad Seeds album “Ghosteen” and Cave’s 2021 collaboration with Warren Ellis, “Carnage,” this remarkable performance documentary may be for the Nick Cave-curious exclusively, but for them (us) it is close to essential.In a ballroom clad in crumbling plasterwork (actually a disused Bristol factory space) Dominik stages the musical sections that make up most of the film, each one a bouquet of barbed wire, sung by Cave — with his ever-witchy charisma — like it’s the last song anyone will ever hear.

In between are occasional off-the-cuff interviews, as we have come to expect from previous Cave documentaries. This time, however, there is a primary focus on performance not seen in Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 2014 “20,000 Days on Earth,” a heightened docu-fictional account of one day in Cave’s life.