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