Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Andrew Dominik's One More Time With Feeling is a remarkable black and white documentary which chronicles the creation of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' album Skeleton Tree. Originally a performance based concept, the film evolved into something much more significant as Dominik delved into the tragic backdrop of the writing and recording of the album. The result is stark, fragile and raw, and a true testament to an artist trying to find his way through the darkness. It documents the writing, recording and performing of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ sixteenth studio album, Skeleton Tree.
One More Time with Feeling is a haunting and singular documentary shaped by unimaginable grief — the death of Nick Cave's son Arthur during the making of Skeleton Tree. Andrew Dominik's direction transforms what might have been a standard music doc into something closer to a meditation on loss and language. The cinematography (a mix of 3D, black-and-white 35mm, and 16mm) is genuinely extraordinary, earning a 4 — austere and immersive in equal measure. Cave himself is devastatingly present, his candor and fragility making the 'acting' (really raw self-disclosure) exceptional. Novelty is high: there is simply nothing else quite like this film in the music documentary canon. The narrative arc, however, is deliberately resistant to conventional structure — which is thematically apt but means the 'plot' in a traditional sense is thin, earning a 3. The ending, while emotionally resonant and musically beautiful, doesn't crystallize into a definitive closing statement, leaving it slightly unresolved rather than transcendent.