A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake

365 Films

Entry #52

A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake (1973)

Directed by Jeroen Berkvens

My introduction to the music of Nick Drake came through the most pedestrian of means: as musical accompaniment to a Volkswagen commercial.  In my auditory ignorance, I remember mistaking Drake’s soulful baritone for that of Eddie Vedder’s.  When you’re young and obsessed with one particular musical act, everything begins to sound exactly like that, whether warranted or not.  As I was still not the least bit Internet savvy, I hesitated before properly reckoning with the Nick Drake catalogue.  Then came the appearance of Fly in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and that seemed to all but clinch the deal for me.  The gorgeous melody, haunting vocals, and evocative guitar playing made the whole thing seem like a no brainer.  Through the wisdom of my sister, Tess, who immediately perceived a kinship between my musical tastes and Mr. Drakes music, I began consuming his musical catalogue at a ravenous pace.  Then came the painful moment for any Nick Drake fan when one learns that there would be no more albums after Pink Moon and that his own life was cut tragically short at the age of twenty-six.  This is all a way of introduction to the fact that several years later, my brother Nate and I were sitting in a tiny theater on east 12^th street in Greenwich Village about to watch A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, a documentary on the life of Nick Drake.  At forty-eight minutes, it barely qualifies as a feature; in fact I’m not even sure what the precise ruling is on this film.  The length, however, is perfect in its way in that the film reflects the compacted nature of Mr. Drake’s life.  Everything seemed to happen to him all at once and he could feel the entirety of living existence on a magnified scale and naturally, that state of being can’t sustain itself for very long.  The film itself does a lovely job of putting the viewer inside the headspace of its subject.  There are gorgeously rendered shots gliding and floating through Nick’s childhood home and subsequent resting place married to early demos of his music where one feels as though they are seeing the world, as Nick would have.  He was a ghostly apparition examining the world around him and expressing himself through the creations in his head, the only way he knew how.  Nick’s collaborators also get a decent say in his story and in one miraculous sequence, the demonstration of a track mix reveals the lengths to which Nick demonstrably inspired those around him.   So we are sitting in the theater and as the forty-eight minutes unspool in front of us, something remarkable occurs to me.  At the end of the film, Nick’s sister, Gabrielle (a woman who has worked tirelessly to preserve the legacy of her brother and mother) comments upon the cruel twist of fate that the source of Nick’s depression was that his music didn’t reach anybody or help anybody in his time.  I then realized that here we are, the group of us, sitting in this tiny theater in New York, watching a film about a musician from the other side of the world who was though to be long forgotten for over two decades.  Even the acclaim he has received now wouldn’t even dare to aspire to the level of adulation today’s pop stars.  There was no marketing blitz behind this movie, no million-dollar ad campaign, and nobody was here because somebody told him or her to be (then again, I’m sure a few people were dragged so take what I say with a grain of salt).  For the most part, everybody in that theater was there because they genuinely loved and have been touched by Nick Drake’s music.  His music accomplished exactly what he set out to do.  It’s a sad story any way you spin it, the only solace being now it has the best possible ending and it will continue for generations to come.