One More Time With Feeling, film review: Nick Cave’s friend explores depths of his grief with extraordinary power

Nick Cave and his family were devastated by tragedy when his 15-year-old son Arthur died falling from a cliff near their home in Brighton last summer.

At first, this film seems a straightforward account of the musician’s improvisatory creative process in the studio, combined with interviews with him speaking in his diverted preacherman style. But then it turns increasingly into a direct relation of what his family has suffered.

Cave’s wife Susie Bick shows a painting she found, which Arthur had done when he was about five of the place where he later fell, framed in black long ago.

Cave, his face crumpled, tells film-maker Andrew Dominik he would never have dreamed of talking like this on camera a year before. “I just don’t have any handle on anything any more.”

People offer “a greeting card-size platitude, he lives in my heart — he is in my heart but he doesn’t live at all”, the singer says.

What he does have are a series of incredibly powerful, grieving songs, composed of his distinctive performative utterances — “I need you”, “I call on you”.

Cave has always had a power of direct address, sidestepping quibble. These performances go even further. “There’s something about the naked nature of the songs that has Arthur all through them,” he says.

Dominik, the director of Chopper, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and Killing Them Softly, has a long-standing connection with the singer. Indeed he used Cave’s first hit, Release The Bats, in his debut film.

Perhaps it is this connection that has allowed him to make this extraordinary documentary, about the creation of Cave’s new album, Skeleton Tree, out on Friday. It’s been shot in black-and-white 3D, which at first seems a bizarre choice but soon reveals itself as a powerful combination of enhanced reality and formal distancing, embracing shadow and darkness.

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