Dominik (director of "Killing Them Softly," "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") tries to preserve Cave's uncertainty by presenting Cave's studio recordings as a mix of polished concert footage and off-the-cuff interview footage that reveals Cave's tortured headspace. Cave tells Dominik that Arthur's death has obstructed his creative process by making him feel adrift. Dominik tries to illustrate the "elastic" interminable present moment that Cave is experiencing by conflating time and space during recording sessions.
"One More Time with Feeling" is a uniquely cinematic documentary, one that actively blurs the line between fact and fiction. Sometimes Dominik's 3D camera drifts through solid surfaces, including people, doors and walls. Sometimes it snakes around Cave while 2D videographers film Dominik at work. Once or twice, voiceover narration of Cave's innermost thoughts—recorded after the events filmed—give us a hyper-real window into his thought process. This isn't really a movie about creativity, though it is that, after a fashion. Instead, this is a movie about the pause before the end of a creative obstacle. We join Cave moments just after he's decided to continue struggling without his son. Arthur's death still weighs on him, as it would any parent. But Skeleton Tree is now out in the world, and cannot be contained by Cave's subconscious.
I hesitate to credit Cave's subconscious with having done the heavy-lifting on Skeleton Tree since he himself seems unsure from where his newest album's songs came. He talks about "Gods" and "accidents," and repeatedly talks about God and his bandmates in the same breath. Like the late Leonard Cohen's music—an acknowledged influence on Cave's style—Cave seeks answers to spiritual questions for which he suspects he already knows the answers. He is his own God because he is, as he tells Dominik when he reads lyrics to as-yet-unreleased songs, different than the universe since he has "consciousness." Cave's art is a struggle to paradoxically honor and resist his consciousness' need to make sense of the world. When Dominik asks why Cave's recent music isn't driven by narratives, the musician responds, "Real life isn't like that." But art can be, Dominik argues, by creating a beautifully unhinged snapshot of Cave just after he experiences a major personal loss and a minor creative epiphany.
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