An intricate and stylized blend of documentary and fantasy, 20,000 Days on Earth is a chronicle of a day in the life of Nick Cave, the legendary Australian singer and songwriter who has led an ever-expanding-and-contracting group of musicians known as the Bad Seeds for 30 years. He drives around Brighton, the rain-swept seaside city he now calls home. He visits his therapist. He contemplates a personal archive of diaries and photographs. He watches Scarface with his twin sons and also has (perhaps imaginary) conversations with such luminaries as "Where the Wild Roses Grow" duet partner Kylie Minogue and actor Ray Winstone, who played a significant role in the Cave-penned Western The Proposition. We also see he and his Bad Seeds composing and rehearsing songs from their most recent studio album, Push the Sky Away. A bright peripheral personality is Warren Ellis, the bearded violinist who has become Cave's foremost collaborator.

Cave is a larger-than-life figure on record, conjuring a wildly profane lyrical universe of angels and demons, deviant outlaws and romantic heroes. And he may be larger still on stage: gyrating, lean, well-tailored, screaming, whispering, and doing his very best to both seduce and disturb the audience, particularly the adoring victims in the first few rows. This film, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, lets him explain itself and hold an intimate type of court, but it never feigns absolute honesty: it is an intoxicating cinematic act of sleight of hand, diving beneath parts of this cult hero's mythology while also forging fresh dimensions of chic, sinister mystique. The photography is beautiful; the hand-held, on-the-fly images often expected from a pop-music documentary are replaced by careful compositions and evocative atmospherics.

Cave is a masterful weaver of stories not only in song, but also in conversation, and it is a pleasure to hear a man with his vocabulary and acumen for introspection explain, say, the torments and triumphs of creativity. There are several touching moments, including remembrances of an enigmatic father who read from Nabokov for bedtime stories and abruptly died when Cave was still a teenager. There are also instances of humor, apocalyptic daydreams, and enthusiastic cultural memories, such as a Nina Simone concert Cave recalls transforming from tense and uncomfortable to celebratory and transcendent as the night went on. For people who are established fans of his, this film is the definition of a must-see. It is a gift beneath the tree on Christmas morning. (The other gifts might be a Colt .45, a lyre, a red right hand, and a dead firstborn.) I suspect it will also entertain and delight Cave neophytes, even if it mystifies them at first. Such is the quality of the production, and such is the magnetism of the man.

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