Ellis Park review – like its subject, Warren Ellis documentary moves to the beat of its own drum

Warren Ellis has co-founded a wildlife sanctuary in Indonesia with animal rights activist Femke den Haas. Photograph: Rewind Photo Lab

For his first documentary, the Australian auteur Justin Kurzel – whose oeuvre includes Snowtown, True History of the Kelly Gang and Nitram – was never going to direct a paint-by-numbers talking heads fest. Hence it came as no surprise that his portrait of the musician Warren Ellis, a member of the Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is a richly cinematic affair, opening with a blurry shot of a field that wouldn’t look out of place in any of his narrative productions. It quickly evolves into a work with a living, breathing, morphing energy, as if the film – which is drifty and amorphous, in a good way – is swelling and shrinking, expanding and contracting, right in front of us.

Nor was it a surprise that music is a big part of it. On several occasions the frame bobs around the subject in a swaying motion as he conducts a one-man hoedown, tearing at his violin with fire-on-the-mountain energy and panache, as if he were a middle-aged Johnny from The Devil Went Down to Georgia, using his bow and strings to rip shreds off Lucifer. Ellis has intriguing presence and a compelling mien: the visage and hard-earned reflections of an introspective person who has been to a lot of places, done a lot of dope and learned a lot of lessons.