Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party

AroView: The extraordinary story of the Australian bad boy rockers who morphed out of Nick Cave’s teenage band, The Boys Next Door, in 1980.

The early days are fleshed out with some gnarly animation and there’s plenty of incredible performance footage once their notoriety took flight in the UK, Europe and America. Cave as a performer was a force of nature from the outset, but the whole band proved some kind of singular monster of cathartic aggression. The singer once quipped that it was the duty of a young man to find disgrace and the duty of an older man to find grace. Fulfilling those duties and then some, this is a film to commemorate that glorious disgrace.

“Fans of the legendary post-punk band the Birthday Party will take to Ian White’s new film like pigs to slop… the uninitiated will probably also have a good time with this full-tilt boogie, sonic assault of a documentary, which paints a warts-and-all portrait of the band and its members. ” ~Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian