I would readily declare Nick Cave a genius, particularly after experiencing 20,000 Days on Earth—and still, what’s remarkable about this film that blends biography and fiction, penned by Cave alongside directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, is its understated nature. Many films focusing on musicians, especially rock stars, fall victim to something like The Amadeus Syndrome; instead, 20,000 Days offers a welcome reminder that inspiration needs to find you while you’re working—and by ‘you,’ I mean anyone; if Cave himself possesses genius, it's not because his ideas are invariably correct but because he understands the right approach to all ideas: “We cannot afford to be idle. Acting on an imperfect notion is preferable to inaction, as the value of that idea doesn’t become clear until you put it into practice. Sometimes this idea can seem insignificant—a tiny flame that needs protection from external forces. If you manage to preserve that flame, then substantial and powerful things can be built around it... all stemming from the smallest of ideas.” This is undoubtedly a film about both thought processes and actions. We observe Cave and the Bad Seeds at work in the studio and on stage, but the movie delves even deeper, exploring the origins of a song and what comes before—the ‘pre-song,’ as it were. It’s revealed that everything – including “every private, cherished moment between a husband and wife” – might be "processed and transformed into a song, exaggerated and distorted.” We also discover that songs emerge from disorder (“Contrast is essential; placing two unrelated images next to each other and observing the resulting reaction”), initially “unruly and unconstrained,” and it’s the songwriter's responsibility to seize hold of them in this fluid state and not release them until they "become tamed… something familiar and predictable.” This isn’t easy, given that Cave’s songs aren’t standard ‘verse-bridge-chorus’ arrangements; “Higgs Boson Blues,” featured in the film, exemplifies a stream-of-consciousness song whose greatest quality is its apparent improvisation—in fact, if Cave weren't reading lyrics from a notebook while singing, one might believe he was creating them spontaneously. The entire movie seems deceptively simple – a small idea around which something significant has been created.

Source on TMDB