“I went to Graceland once,” Nick Cave said. “The rest of the band went in, but I stayed out on the curb, smoking cigarettes and feeling sorry for myself. Those last Elvis performances — the ones for television, when he was already sick — I must have watched those clips a hundred times. They’re like crucifixions.” He paused for a moment. “I couldn’t bring myself to go inside.”

It was a bright afternoon in early February, and Cave was in a boutique in Berlin’s trendy Friedrichshain district, buying souvenirs for his sons. “Do you have these in kids’ sizes?” he asked, holding up a belt with the word “kleptomaniac” engraved across its buckle. The saleswoman was making a serious effort not to seem star-struck, but Cave’s attention was elsewhere. “These might work,” he said in his travel-worn Australian accent, as he squinted fiercely at a pair of fuzzy white abominable snowmen. “My kids are at that lovely age where they’re just figuring out what’s good in music,” he said. “They’re just grabbing stuff, on Spotify and all that, and occasionally they’ll find something that’s really mind-blowing. But sometimes I hear what they’re playing, and I just want to cut my wrists.”

Cave, perhaps best known as the frontman for the seminal postpunk groups Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, was in Germany to promote “20,000 Days on Earth,” a film about his life, which was showing at the Berlin film festival. At 56, Cave can claim at least half a dozen vocations: songwriter and performer with the Bad Seeds and their garage-rock offshoot, Grinderman; screenwriter of the acclaimed (and extremely gory) movies “Proposition” and “Lawless”; novelist; film-score composer; lecturer; script doctor; and on certain (perhaps thankfully) rare occasions, even actor. His books are best sellers; his film scores have won prizes; musicians as far-flung as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and St. Vincent cite him as an influence; and the Bad Seeds’ most recent album, “Push the Sky Away,” has proved to be one of the most commercially successful of the band’s career, reaching No. 1 on the UK Independent album chart.

“As far as work goes, I’m something of a megalomaniac,” Cave told me later that day. “But a megalomaniac with extremely low self-esteem.” We were sitting in the restaurant of his hotel in Berlin Mitte, trying to have a conversation in the face of frequent interruptions from festival staff, acquaintances and a seemingly never-ending stream of admirers. Tall, gaunt and slightly ungainly, in his snakeskin shoes, chunky rings and rakishly well-tailored suits, Cave resembles nothing so much as a postmillennial hybrid of bookie and peer of the realm. His long, backswept hair, dyed black since the age of 16, frames a face that has been described both as “angelic” and “hideous to the eye,” the latter by Cave himself, in song. It’s the kind of look only a rock star could get away with, especially at his age, but on Cave it seems as dignified — as inexplicably appropriate — as those rhinestone-studded jumpsuits did on Elvis in his later years. Cave’s public persona has been called “theatrical,” but a more precise term might be cinematic. Like many self-mythologizers, charismatics and plain old eccentrics, he has always appeared to be performing in a movie only he himself could see.

The closest the rest of us may come to seeing that movie may well be “20,000 Days on Earth.” Cave co-wrote the film with its directors, the artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, with whom he has collaborated on a number of smaller projects — music videos and short films. It’s unorthodox, to put it mildly, for the subject of a documentary to be given a screenwriting credit, but very little about “20,000 Days” could be described as orthodox. As its title suggests, the film is an investigation into the passage of time, into memory and aging and artistic survival, as dramatized by a single imaginary day in the life of its subject, the musician Nick Cave. While working on a song, Cave began to play with the idea of measuring his life in days instead of years, and Forsyth and Pollard, who were documenting the band as they recorded “Push the Sky Away,” saw potential for a film. When I asked Cave what drew him to the notion of Day 20,000, he regarded me dryly. “ ‘Fifty-four Years and Nine Months on Earth’ didn’t have quite the same ring to it, somehow.”

A number of recent documentaries have explored the nebulous boundary between reportage and fiction, but in “20,000 Days,” Pollard and Forsyth try to dispense with that boundary altogether. From the first frame to the last, the film was plotted and set-dressed and professionally lit and has all the glitter of a big-budget feature; but, while a series of voice-overs by Cave were scripted, every on-screen interaction — from a visit to a therapist to a ride in his Jaguar with Kylie Minogue — was spontaneous and unrehearsed. In the case of figures from Cave’s past with whom he had fallen out of contact (like the founding Bad Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld, who left the group abruptly more than 10 years ago), the co-directors went even further: No conversation about the scene was allowed until the camera was rolling.

“Nick would have never gone for a straightforward rock-doc,” Forsyth told me in Berlin. “We decided to go in a direction that combined reality with fantasy as seamlessly as possible — which, if you think about it, isn’t too far from the transaction between a rock star and his fans. People want desperately to enter the world Nick creates in his songs. You can look around when the Bad Seeds are playing and see precisely which version of Nick — the junkie, the outlaw, the lover — each person in the crowd wants to be.”

The film had its premiere at Sundance in January (it won the world documentary awards for best directing and best editing) and will be released nationally in September, following preview screenings this summer that coincide with Cave’s North American tour. That such an idiosyncratic movie would capture not just the imagination of the festival crowd but also of a U.S. distributor is testament, contrary to what even the most ardent fan in his gutter-punk glory days could have foreseen, to the remarkably broad appeal that his elegant, lecherous, literate, unapologetically romantic persona has come to have in recent decades.

Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries — many of whom have gradually faded from view (Bauhaus, the Pop Group) or been relegated to the purgatory of back-catalog tours (the Sisters of Mercy, the Cure) — Cave has managed to invent a self-contained, coherent fictional world that both he and his followers can enter at will; a kind of exercise in collaborative mythmaking that seems to deepen with each variation on the theme. “If Nick Cave decided to start a cult,” I heard one woman say after the Berlin screening, “I’d be the first to join.”

“Nothing happened in my childhood — no trauma or anything,” Cave said, when I asked after the origins of his sensibility. “I just had a genetic disposition toward things that were horrible.”

Nicholas Edward Cave was born on Sept. 22, 1957, in Warracknabeal, Victoria (population now 2,745), northwest of Melbourne. His mother and father, Dawn and Colin Cave — the librarian and English teacher of the high school he would eventually attend — instilled a reverence for the arts in their children from an early age. “My father read me the first chapter of ‘Lolita’ when I turned 12,” Cave told me. “Something happened to him when he read it aloud. He became a different man. He became elevated. I felt like I was being initiated into this secret world: the world of sex and adulthood and art. At the same time, though, I was only a kid, and I couldn’t always meet his expectations. He’d catch me reading some nasty little thriller, and he’d rip it out of my hands and tell me: ‘You want a bleeding body count? Read “Titus Andronicus”!’ ”

In spite of (or perhaps because of) his parents’ presence both at home and at school, Cave lasted barely a year at Wangaratta High before being expelled (“for general disruption,” as he described it to me.) His mother maintains that he was pulled out before he could be kicked out, but either way, his departure was of little consequence to him. He had decided that he was going to be a painter. “I had huge artistic ambitions as a kid,” he told me. “I liked a lot of the tortured, gothic, religious stuff — Matthias Grünewald and Stefan Lochner and the Spaniards — and I wanted to make paintings with that kind of power. There was something about just being in a room by yourself and making art that excited me. It’s exciting to me still, this weird medium of applying paint to a canvas and the restrictions of a square, two-dimensional frame.” He paused. “It’s not unlike the restrictions of a song, in a way.”

Cave ended up at a boarding school in Melbourne, where he fell in with a crew of degenerates in training who had more or less taken over the school’s art department, and they soon founded a band, the Boys Next Door. The songs that Cave wrote with Mick Harvey, the band’s stoic, clean-cut guitarist, formed the beginning of a collaboration that would last from 1974 to well past the end of the millennium. The Boys Next Door soon won a small but rabid following, in part by carrying audience confrontation to extremes that not even their primary points of reference — the Stooges and the New York Dolls — saw fit to explore. “The only places that would have us were beer barns and [military] league clubs,” Cave told me, smiling nostalgically. A typical show might include brawls with the audience, instruments being played in incompatible time signatures and passed-out band members, to say nothing of the lyrics themselves, which one critic described as “a mixture of paranoia, demented self-parody and neurotic, inebriated passion.” By the time the band rechristened itself the Birthday Party, in 1978, the number of clubs they were banned from outnumbered those that would have them, and their cult status in Australia was assured.

Cave’s life had begun to embody the degradation and excess that the Birthday Party celebrated in its songs. His casual use of heroin and speed grew into a full-blown dependency, and he was acquiring an estimable record of arrests. On Oct. 11, 1978, when Cave was being held in a Melbourne police station on charges of vandalism and theft, the police informed Cave and his mother, who came to post bail, that his father had just been killed in a car accident. This conjunction of events is one he still has difficulty discussing. One of the most revealing scenes in “20,000 Days” comes during Cave’s morning therapy session, in which the therapist, Dr. Darian Leader, tries to explore the subject of Colin Cave’s death. “I was 19,” Cave begins, speaking with obvious effort, “and that really just came out of the blue. That was something that kind of rocked the whole family.” He then reverts to a tense and stony silence. Leader finally says, “Shall we stop there?”

In the winter of 1980, the Birthday Party moved to London, where it released two brilliant albums, “Prayers on Fire” and “Junkyard.” Cave, who at first didn’t care much for London — perhaps because he spent much of his time there in a Maida Vale squat, going through periodic heroin withdrawal — felt himself drawn to Berlin, where rent was cheap, amphetamines were plentiful and the band had played some memorable shows. “We found a genuine artistic community in Berlin,” Cave told me. “Filmmakers, musicians, painters. . . . There was a level of inclusion that we never had in London.”

In Berlin, Cave became a regular at a Kreuzberg bar called Risiko, whose sometime bartender, Blixa Bargeld, fronted the industrial-music pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings), whose militant anti-commercialism Cave admired. Bargeld contributed his radical sensibility to the final Birthday Party recording sessions (“He’s always approached the guitar with reticence and loathing,” Cave told me appreciatively) and stuck with Cave in the wake of the band’s dissolution, as did Mick Harvey.

In September 1983, Cave traveled to Garden Studios in London to record for the first time under his own name. The album that resulted, “From Her to Eternity,” was even less classifiable than the music Cave made with the Birthday Party or the Boys Next Door: an echoing, loose-limbed collection of seven ominous, stomping, meandering dirges that managed to transmit all of punk’s anger and abhorrence while avoiding most of the clichés of an already stultifying genre. The album established Cave and the Bad Seeds, as his crew of collaborators was now called, virtually overnight. The New Musical Express, probably Britain’s most influential music magazine, began its review with: “Nick Cave’s ‘From Her to Eternity’ is one of the greatest rock albums ever made.”

Cave now lives in Brighton, England, with his wife and twin 14-year-old sons, in a residence that would have seemed, for a number of reasons, inconceivable to the scarecrow-haired punk he was back in Berlin. When I met him this winter, he was renting a modest office a short walk from his house, keeping regular office hours like a bona fide salaryman. (“I used to go six days a week, till I couldn’t stand it anymore,” Cave said with a grin. “Now I go Sundays as well.”)

Apart from a small upright piano off to one side, a microphone stand and a haphazard-looking collection of photos and pages torn from magazines pinned to the wall, the room itself could have passed for the office of a determinedly anachronistic clerk: a good-size desk, a manual typewriter and a well-used bottle of whiteout. His work ethic has long been legendary. While writing one of his best-known songs, “Red Right Hand,” from the 1994 album “Let Love In,” Cave filled an entire notebook with descriptions of the imaginary town the song was set in, including maps and sketches of prominent buildings, virtually none of which made it into the lyrics. “It’s good to have a place to go and just write,” Cave told me in Brighton. “I haven’t always had that luxury.”

It was in Berlin that Cave undertook the first of the extramusical forays that would eventually come to define him as the renaissance man of the “postpunk” generation: a grotesque, blood-spattered, Faulkner-saturated novel titled “And the Ass Saw the Angel.” Set in the imaginary valley of Ukulore in some fever-dream iteration of the American South, the novel chronicles the nightmarish sufferings and stomach-churning appetites of Euchrid Eucrow, an inbred and mentally ill mute, whose fixation on the local prostitute, Cosey Mo, and Beth, her saintly, otherworldly daughter, does not, to put it mildly, turn out well. The novel obsessed Cave completely, often at the expense of more lucrative work, and took him three years of almost daily effort to finish.

“It definitely had something to do with my father, that book,” Cave told me in Berlin. “He was an aspiring writer himself as a young man, and literature was a matter of life or death to him. My mother recently showed me a letter he wrote her, about this theater piece he was directing, and it’s written with such intensity — his frustrations with the actors and with the budget and so on. There’s this mania and enthusiasm for the work that’s very beautiful to me. Then, at the end, you find out he’s talking about a school play. So, yeah, the book may have felt on some level like unfinished business. But it took over my life in a way that wasn’t healthy, for me or the people around me. And as soon as I’d finished it, I left Berlin.”

Cave spent the next three years in São Paulo, Brazil, where he moved after meeting the fashion stylist Viviane Carneiro. Shortly after the birth of their son, Luke, Cave returned to London with his family and began to work on a new album, comprising songs about violent death. The album — titled, appropriately enough, “Murder Ballads” — would prove a pivotal one in Cave’s career, furnishing him with his first mainstream radio hit (“Where the Wild Roses Grow,” featuring Kylie Minogue), and propelling him, by way of a duet with the British alt-rock star P. J. Harvey, into a relationship with which he is associated to this day, not least because it resulted, in 1997, in what many regard as his masterpiece: “The Boatman’s Call.”

“People often compare ‘Boatman’s Call’ with ‘Blood on the Tracks,’ ” Cave told me during one of our conversations in Brighton, referring to Bob Dylan’s breakup-themed magnum opus. “Too much for my liking, I have to say. I’ve got no idea what led Dylan to make that album, but in my case, there was a coming together of a particular bunch of unfortunate events — brokenhearted moments but epiphanies, as well — that hit me all at once and became what the record was about.” He smiled. “Not a happy time, particularly. At least I got some songs out of it.”

The 12 tracks on “The Boatman’s Call” chronicle both the dissolution of Cave’s relationship with Carneiro and the arc of his brief but passionate love affair with Harvey, which played out very much in public: The couple’s first kiss took place on camera, during the filming of their “Murder Ballads” duet, “Henry Lee.” The album’s spare, candid songs allowed a listener, perhaps for the first time, to guess at the human being behind Cave’s outsize persona and freed him from the restrictions of the “Old Testament by way of Southern gothic” genre that he, with a good deal of help from Mick Harvey, Bargeld and the rest of the Bad Seeds, had invented.

Since that high-water mark, Cave has released seven studio albums, appeared in three films, written two produced screenplays and published a second novel, “The Death of Bunny Munro”; but possibly the two most pivotal events in that time stand apart from his creative life. Shortly after the release of “The Boatman’s Call,” Cave met the British model Susie Bick, to whom he has now been married for a decade and a half, and he soon kicked heroin for good after more than 20 years of addiction. As Cave himself puts it, in a recording featured near the end of “20,000 Days”: “The first time I saw Susie was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And when she came walking in, all the things that I have obsessed over for all the years, pictures of movie stars, Jenny Agutter in the billabong, Anita Ekberg in the fountain . . . Miss World competitions, Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Jones and Bo Derek . . . Bolshoi ballerinas and Russian gymnasts . . . the young girls at the Wangaratta pool lying on the hot concrete, all the stuff I had heard and seen and read . . . all the continuing never-ending drip-feed of erotic data . . . came together at that moment, in one great big crash bang, and I was lost to her. And that was that.”

Cave’s life in Brighton is that of a conventional family man, with certain noteworthy exceptions. On a recent afternoon, we were having lunch in a pub called the Ginger Dog with Warren Ellis — the Bad Seeds’ wild-bearded multi-instrumentalist and Cave’s closest collaborator for more than a decade — when a tweedy-looking man in his 60s approached us. “Excuse me, but are you Nick Cave?” he asked bashfully. “I’ve just moved to Brighton, you see, and I do bronze heads.”

“Heads?” Cave said matter of factly, as though this sort of thing happened on a regular basis. “I’ve been looking to get a life-size portrait done, on horseback. You couldn’t do that?

The man stammered a bit, but eventually responded in the positive.

“In gold, wasn’t it?” Ellis added.

“That’s right,” Cave said, taking the man’s card politely. “A mounted equestrian portrait, in gold. Would that be in your line?”

After assuring the artist, who looked pleased, but bewildered, that he would visit his website, Cave took up the conversation where we left off. I had asked why he thought his music, which can be as graphic as the most brutal death metal or gangsta rap, has always found, in marked contrast to, say, death metal, such a wide and passionate following among women.

“I have a female audience in my mind when I write,” he said. “That being said” — he smiled wryly at Ellis — “I’m often flabbergasted by what some women find sexy in my music.”

“In a lot of what Nick writes, there’s a woman’s voice in there,” Ellis said. “Nick’s a writer, you know? He takes things like voice and point of view seriously.”

“Not all women like it,” Cave added. “I’ve been called all sorts of things. But even the material that’s the most. . . . ” He cast about for the word. “The most forceful sexually, it’s always riddled with anxiety. If my songs came off as just a male thing, I wouldn’t have any interest in that whatsoever.”

Cave and Ellis had been up until the wee hours in a nearby studio, trying out ideas for the Bad Seeds’ next album, and the talk turned to a new songwriting method that the band developed over the course of their most recent recordings, a topic that made them both seem, in that instant, like two boys who had just started their first band.

“What we do is we record nonstop,” said Cave, with a sudden animation that surprised me. “We go in in the morning, and we just sit there for seven or eight hours with headphones on and just play anything, no matter how awful. The songs are completely abstract when we start; no one even knows what key we’re in — ”

“Well, I know,” Ellis said amiably.

“ — and there’s something going on between the musicians, about discovering something, that can be impossible to repeat. It couldn’t be more different from the way I wrote for some of my earlier albums, like ‘The Boatman’s Call’ or ‘No More Shall We Part.’ It’s more the way we did it back at the beginning, making the first Bad Seeds record with Blixa and Barry” — Adamson, bassist for the group — “and Mick.”

“ ‘Push the Sky Away’ feels like a first record, in a way,” Ellis said. “It felt that way to make it.”

“Now comes the dreaded follow-up,” Cave added, not looking as though he was dreading it at all.

Exactly 24 hours after our lunch at the Ginger Dog, Cave was reclining in a swivel chair in the gleaming, walnut-paneled control room of AIR Studios in the discreetly upscale Hampstead neighborhood, listening to the ever-voluble Ellis joking and cajoling an 18-piece orchestra into playing the score the two of them wrote for the film “Loin des Hommes” (a French production starring Viggo Mortensen) with just an iota more bite. “I love what the celli are doing!” Ellis said at one point, which caused Cave to arch an eyebrow. “Is that how you say it?” he murmured. “I’d always thought it was cellos.” This was practically all he said for the next hour.

Over and over, on two large flat-screen monitors suspended from the mixing-room ceiling, Mortensen and his co-star, the French-Algerian actor Reda Kateb, walked to the crest of a hill, exchanged a few words, then made their way down a winding stone path, to the fervent accompaniment of the musicians on the far side of the glass. While Ellis talked a blue streak, Cave maintained his remove. He’d brought a heavily annotated paperback with him: a copy of a novel he was considering adapting into a screenplay for Forsyth and Pollard. Beside it on the table, in no discernible order, lay an oversize copy of the score (“Loin des Hommes, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis”), a CD of “The Boatman’s Call” and a page of mysterious notes that I allowed myself to sneak a glance at. They were attenuated and cryptic and either had to do with the film adaptation, ideas for the next album, a screenplay he was currently script-doctoring or an exegesis of Dante’s “Inferno.” Based on what I knew of Cave, it might easily have been all of the above.

As “20,000 Days On Earth” nears its end, Cave slouches happily on the couch in front of the TV, his sons on either side of him, watching a movie. The viewer can’t see what the Cave clan is watching —— judging by the dialogue, it could be Brian De Palma’s “Scarface,” but it isn’t hard to imagine Cave screening “The Proposition” or “Lawless” for his boys. (“We used to have something called inappropriate-film night,” Cave told me earlier. “I’d sit my boys down and show them something no sane father would ever show his young sons — ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ something that scared the hell out of them — and it was a wonderful bonding moment. Now there’s no other kind of film night at all.”) It’s an oddly affecting scene, and watching it, I couldn’t help thinking back to something Cave said at our first meeting, describing his emotions when his own father read to him from “Lolita”: “I was 12 years old at the time, so I didn’t understand half of what I was hearing. ‘Fire of my loins’? What on earth did that mean? And some of it made me very uneasy. But more than anything else, the words he was reading excited me. I knew nothing would ever be the same.”

I am the real Nick Cave, by John Wray, NYtimes.com