Film review: Mutiny in Heaven: Nick Cave & The Birthday Party takes a stage dive back into legendary band's chaotic rise and fall
Through a wild mix of rare concert footage, animation, and interviews, new documentary revisits Aussie group that “annihilated” its audiences
The Birthday Party in its heyday, with Nick Cave second from left, in Mutiny in Heaven.
Mutiny in Heaven is at the VIFF Centre to September 23
“LIKE BEING ANNIHILATED” with “no care for life and limb”. Those are just two descriptions of the experience of watching Nick Cave’s The Birthday Party when it detonated onto the postpunk scene in the late 1970s. Cave perhaps puts it best, though: “It was just. Fucking. Crazy.”
Ian White’s hyperjacked documentary reminds you of a time when rock music was legitimately dangerous—in an era when that’s easy to forget.
Mimicking the chaos of the Melbourne-spawned band, White mashes together riveting rare concert footage, archival photographs, animated lyric scribbles and doodle sheets, and graphic-novel-esque cartoon re-enactments of the band at the height of its madness. At the centre of it all is Cave, a shock-haired, emaciated contrast to his cool, suave-suited persona of today. For diehard fans, the film is a reminder of the reckless youth and years of balls-out touring that still feed his inimitable stage presence.
Underneath the gonzo style, Mutiny in Heaven has the standard makings of a solid rockumentary, with copious research, rare footage, unreleased tracks, and old and new interviews tracing the unlikely birth of the anarchic band in Australia (when the high-school chums were known—beyond ironically—as The Boys Next Door). It follows them to their poverty-and-drug years in one-room dives in London, where they were literally malnourished, to their heyday in Berlin, and on the road to shock the shit out of American music fans before self-destructing.
What’s so striking is how anti-commercial the band was, constantly confounding the industry and its fans—making music, as is said so aptly in the film, that is “the antithesis of what albums are supposed to sound like.” A contradiction of literary bookworms and hardcore partiers, the Birthday boys were interested in expressing something primal and alienated in the psyche. In concert footage, the young Cave often looks like some kind of possessed gargoyle, doubled over and convulsing with his mike and getting dragged into writhing mosh pits. Add stetson-hatted bassist Tracey Pew, gothy intellectual Rowland S. Howard on guitar, plus drummer Phill Calvert and guitarist Mick Harvey—all equally “unshackled”, as the ever-erudite Cave puts it—and you had that kind of live chemistry where anything could happen onstage.
For Cave completists, the stylized and often funny documentary will fill in parts of his past that the star rarely speaks of today. And for superfans, it offers enough concert mayhem to help assuage the fact Cave won’t be hitting Vancouver in his North American tour this year.
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