“My brother was a man of few words,” says Gabrielle Drake, in a very British understatement about her late younger sibling, Nick. Thus the paradox of a man who left three albums of eloquent songs about his inner life and little else. No interviews, no videos . . . none of the noisy trappings of the music business attend the career of Nick Drake. There’s just the music. And on his finest songs, that too seems to emanate from a void.
Jeroen Berkvens’s impressionistic documentary seeks to make that void visible by recording its surroundings. Shots of the stunning landscape around the Drakes’ Warwickshire family home in Tanworth-in-Arden (it might as well be called Tanworth-in-Eden) dominate this film, as indeed they must have dominated Nick Drake’s life. His room in that house — where he grew up, where he returned in his adult depression, and where he died of a prescription-drug overdose at age 26 — was his world, for better and worse. And the view out its window, with its Tarkovsky-like melancholy and beauty, is as near an analogue for Drake’s music as any film could provide. Interviews with family and professional colleagues help fill out the story, but this remains a film about an enigma.
