The National - Light Years

When Mike Mills made Light Years for The National in 2019, he was not really making a conventional music video. The film grew out of a much larger idea that became I Am Easy to Find, a 24 minute short film created by Mills to accompany The National’s eighth album. What began as a conversation about making a video gradually expanded into something far more ambitious, with Mills given unusual creative freedom to build a visual world around the band’s music.

Light Years works almost like a memory of that larger film. Alicia Vikander moves through different stages of a woman’s life, from childhood and adolescence through love, marriage and motherhood, and eventually towards old age and death. Yet Vikander herself does not visibly age. Instead, time is communicated through the people, places and relationships surrounding her.

This idea is central to Mills’s work. Rather than presenting life as a clean narrative with obvious milestones, Light Years treats it as a collection of fleeting moments. A child leaves home. Someone waits in a car. A family gathers. A parent disappears. People who once seemed permanently present gradually become memories.

That makes the video particularly suited to The National’s song. Light Years is built around the feeling of realising too late how far away someone has become. Matt Berninger sings about absence and emotional distance, about discovering that someone you once knew intimately has somehow moved beyond reach. Mills translates that feeling into images of ordinary life, allowing the melancholy to emerge from what is left unsaid.

There is something deliberately disorienting about seeing Vikander remain essentially unchanged while everything around her moves forward. Time passes, but she remains a constant observer within it. The effect is less about ageing than memory, where different moments of a life can coexist with little sense of chronology.

The collaboration between Mills and The National developed into an unusually fluid creative process. Mills had initially approached the band about making a music video, but the project grew into a much larger cinematic work. The band gave him access to numerous songs, including material that was still developing, and Mills began constructing a narrative around them. The resulting film, I Am Easy to Find, was shot in Los Angeles and placed Vikander at its centre.

That makes Light Years feel less like a standalone promotional film and more like a fragment extracted from a larger cinematic world. Its images are intimate and observational, while its emotional scale is enormous. Mills finds drama in the smallest transitions, using faces, gestures, rooms and domestic spaces to suggest an entire lifetime.

The result is a music video about the strange distance between being present and being remembered. It is about how quickly a life can become a series of images, and how the people closest to us can somehow end up feeling light years away.