Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party review – documentary is a warts-and-all sonic assault
Fans of the legendary post-punk band the Birthday Party will take to Ian White’s new film like pigs to slop, relishing the debaucherous badassery of its subjects and their drug-addled journey to greatness.
The uninitiated will probably also have a good time with this full-tilt boogie, sonic assault of a documentary, which paints a warts-and-all portrait of the band and its members: Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Rowland S Howard, Phill Calvert and Tracy Pew. These wrongside-of-the-tracks artists played by their own rules, spat in the face of decorum and decency, and through a haze of putrid indulgence succeeded against the odds.
“We didn’t do anything to try and be likable,” we hear Harvey comment shortly after the film enters its second hour. And boy does that seem true. Emerging in the late 70s from the noise and stink of Melbourne’s “St Kilda scene”, which we’re told was a “dangerous” and “deranged” community of artists working outside the system, Cave and co were the rough and rowdy people your parents told you to stay away from.
The film opens with a young sweat-slathered Cave on stage, cigarette in hand, delivering a public health announcement: “The front row is not for the fragile.” He doesn’t say why but we can safely assume the reasons include cochlear damage and body fluids. The camera bobs around in slow-mo, as if the frame itself has had a few too many, as White inserts soundgrabs broadly reminiscing on the band and its journey. We’re told the group, with its “naive adventurousness”, stumbled “on to something quite unique” that provided “glimpses into another dimension, another way of perceiving the world”.
People who don’t jive with the
Birthday Party’s discordant and fiercely experimental style aren’t likely to emerge from Mutiny in Heaven sold on those big claims. But many would agree that, on enough drugs, virtually any kind of music can become an astral-projecting pathway through the cosmos.
The film in part is a scuzzy time capsule capturing the post-punk scene in Melbourne and the UK in the 70s and 80s, beginning by touching on the aforementioned St Kilda scene then moving on to the band’s relocation to London, where their drug habits worsened and they developed a reputation as no-hopers to stay away from.
But once they embraced their role as outsiders, the band started to find a groove, recording killer tracks and performing wild concerts to full houses, finding resourceful ways to replenish their stashes by requesting revellers throw their drugs on to the stage.
There’s lots of juicy tidbits, from all the partying stuff to meatier elements such as Cave’s attraction to Christianity and the Bible – a brief tangent that could have been expanded. The singer indicates this wasn’t the standard “born again” chapter in a musician’s career when he recalls: “God was talking not just to me but through me, and his breath stank.”
For extra punch and panache, White integrates animated sequences based on the work of the German artist and graphic novelist Reinhard Kleist, illustrated with a spunky in-your-face style that gels with the film and its subjects beautifully. The use of these animated elements address a core challenge in documentaries about artists: how to use the subject’s work to influence the aesthetic of the film. This challenge was well realised in Ecco Homo, about another artist – Troy Davis – whose career was etched in the postpunk scene, and in 2021’s The Witch of Kings Cross, Sonia Bible’s trippy film about the artist, tabloid sensation and self-professed witch Rosaleen Norton.
By finding ways to mesh together the form of the film with the content of the artist, documentaries about famous creative people can be taken to the next level. In Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party, it’s not just the subjects who rock out but the whole cinematic kit and caboodle, with White imparting a sense that the film, too, is necking bottles, smoking dream pipes and banging around in the mosh pit, soon to wake up with a terrible hangover.
• Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party is screening now in Melbourne; it opens in New South Wales and Canberra on 2 November; and in Perth, Brisbane and Hobart from 9 November. It screens in the UK at Doc’n Roll film festival in London on 12 November