20,000 Days on earth

20,000 Days on Earth Nick Cave emerged from the Australian underground in the 1980s, and while he’s been doing his own, melodic, Cohenesque music for three decades now, it’s taken a long time for Cave to find his own light. One of the wonderful things about 20,000 Days on Earth is how it explores that lengthy creative process without apologizing for a single moment of expression. A mongrel as far as genre, this movie appears to be a documentary of sorts, but Cave is self-reflective enough to know there is no such thing as cinema verité in the era of reality television, and sets about making a movie that has as much artifice as performance. Cave is essentially giving us a tour of his creative persona — and whether it’s a representative reflection of the real man doesn’t really matter. That’s not the man we see and relate to on stage. Like Plato’s cave analogy, the human condition is a state where one only sees the flickering shadows, not the thing itself. “It’s important to me now,” Cave says at one point, “to do shows that really try to offer the audience a transformative experience.” It’s one thing to say it, but it’s another thing to actually pull off — and Cave knows it better than anyone, which is why we spend the second half of the film watching him create his next song-filled spectacle. It’s painful and repetitive and just as angst-inducing as one might imagine the production of real art to be. But it’s also human, accessible and oddly humourous. 20,000 Days on Earth opens wide Sept. 26.