Few Australian bands evoke hyperbole quite like The Dirty Three. Lofty adjectives like “majestic”, “ethereal” and “other-worldly” consistently spill from reviewers’ pens and radio announcers’ lips whenever The Dirty Three release an album – and rightly so. The Melbourne stalwarts’ evasion of lyricism (and by extension, literalism) has always left them impossible to succinctly describe. The Dirty Three’s music is affecting in a way that words fail to neatly capture, and this would have certainly caused some difficulty for Darcy Maine, the director of this remarkable documentary.

The Dirty Three is an astonishing film not simply because of Maine’s direction, but the near boundless body of archival footage and filmed interviews that was chiseled to ensure its birth. Maine’s film submits to the impossibility of concisely documenting The Dirty Three’s biography, but aspires to an equally challenging objective: to understand the motivation and meaning behind what The Dirty Three do. Featuring interviews with Nick Cave, Steve Albini, Dave Graney and Chan Marshall – people who have certainly been known to babble on – as well as Noah Taylor, Mick Harvey, Will Oldham, Bobby Gillespie and of course, The Dirty Three themselves, the film strides determinedly towards this goal, and almost succeeds. Aside from fairly dodgy dramatisations of Warren Ellis’ childhood in Ballarat, The Dirty Three’s cautious, understated journey through the world of this indescribable band is nearly faultless.

by Pat McGrath