20,000 Days on Earth

4/22/2018

Simultaneously one of the most pretentious and brilliant things I have ever seen. If you love Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, you will love this. If you find his music dark and too much hard work, stay away. 8/10

8/28/2022

I wouldn’t hesitate to call Nick Cave a genius, especially not after watching 20,000 Days on Earth – and yet, the beauty of this biofictional film, co-written by Cave with directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, is its humility. Most movies about musicians, particularly rockstars, suffer from what we might call The Amadeus Syndrome; in contrast, 20,000 Days is a refreshing reminder that you must let inspiration find you working – and by ‘you’ I mean anyone; if Cave himself is a genius, it's not because all his ideas are right, but because he has the right idea about all ideas: “We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the worl