The New Documentary About Nick Cave’s Early Band the Birthday Party Is a Thunderous Post-Punk Time Capsule

The doc traces the group’s journey from late-’70s Australia as the Boys Next Door, a solid if unremarkable teenage punk band that changed their name and grew more experimental with the addition of the vampiric, chain-smoking Howard. Extensive footage of these early years is scarce, so Reinhard Kleist, author of the 2017 graphic novel Nick Cave: Mercy On Me, is tapped to plug the gap with original animation. His visceral drawings mirror the mayhem and depravity of the band’s existence (see: veins bursting out the arms of a zombified Cave as he shoots heroin). While animation can often feel twee in music documentaries, here it works as a blunt aesthetic choice that fits the music’s metallic junkyard screech. There is a brutality to the Birthday Party that is capable of penetrating your bones, and the pleasingly thunderous sound mix seems intent on landing as many of those body blows as possible.

There’s no audio or interview footage of bassist Pew, who died in 1986, but in many ways he shouts the loudest—be it his deadly playing, his character (“a very smart but very naughty boy,” says Harvey), or his performances. Mustachioed in leather trousers and a frilly shirt, he gyrates so furiously in one Dutch TV gig that he looks like a cowboy-hatted pneumatic drill burrowing himself into the stage floor.

The film captures dichotomies that were central to the band and their endless internal and external conflicts. While there was a seething fury, reckless abandon, and dark humor present in their work, there was also sincerity, earnestness, and focused artistic ambition. “This is not entertainment,” says Howard at one point, with Cave adding: “The Birthday Party was a conceptual statement but we were making music that was misunderstood… we are the only aggressive, direct, primitive group that also has some inkling of intelligence about it as well.”

Gaining a reputation for live shows that were forceful enough to loosen fillings in your teeth, they pulled in a bloodthirsty crowd that, according to the band, was increasingly missing the point. “The Birthday Party did attract the most cynical, self-loathing nihilists you could imagine,” Cave writes in the 2022 book Faith, Hope and Carnage. “The sort of people I have never really had time for, even back in the day when I was one myself.” Frustrations with the audience, intra-band arguments, major burn-out, and serious drug habits all pointed to the end. Within three years of landing in loathful London, they imploded.

While it is punchy and engaging, Mutiny in Heaven can sometimes feel a little too conventional for such an unorthodox outfit. However, this does allow the band’s fury to be the central focus, as you’re thrown into a world that is as sonically pulverizing as it is head-spinning and chaotic. As the credits roll, you almost feel battered and bruised, hit with a heavy comedown.