Kurt Cobain: Mon­tage of Heck

Rock star, father, addict, hus­band, idol, vic­tim, son. How­ev­er you choose to remem­ber Kurt Cobain, there is lit­tle debate that 21 years after his death the Nir­vana front­man remains as allur­ing and enig­mat­ic a pop cul­ture fig­ure as ever. The records may spin less fre­quent­ly now, the posters that once adored bed­room walls neat­ly fold­ed away in the fad­ed col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of yesterday’s youth, but the endur­ing image is that of a bril­liant and tor­tured artist – a bona fide 20^th cen­tu­ry icon who broke the mould and then blew his brains out.

The prob­lem with films that seek either to com­mem­o­rate or canon­ise trag­ic stars is that they can often be accused of fuelling the mythol­o­gy sur­round­ing their cho­sen sub­ject. Direc­tor Brett Mor­gen large­ly avoids this trap, thanks in no small part to Cobain’s wid­ow, Court­ney Love, who grant­ed him unprece­dent­ed access to Kurt’s per­son­al archives, mak­ing this the first doc­u­men­tary to be made with the full coop­er­a­tion of Cobain’s fam­i­ly. Kurt and Courtney’s daugh­ter, Frances Bean Cobain, even served as an exec­u­tive-pro­duc­er on the film. The result is a detailed autho­rised por­trait of a com­plex human being com­posed from a seem­ing­ly end­less sup­ply of jour­nal entries, song­books, demo tapes, home video footage, sketch­es and audio clips.

Tak­ing us from his hum­ble ori­gins in Aberdeen, Wash­ing­ton, through Nirvana’s for­ma­tion and stratos­pher­ic rise before final­ly broach­ing the con­tro­ver­sial top­ic of his decline in men­tal health and even­tu­al sui­cide, Morgen’s film metic­u­lous­ly pieces togeth­er the scat­tered, some­times dis­tort­ed frag­ments of Cobain’s sto­ry. It’s an exhaus­tive piece of work, fit­ting­ly rest­less in its search for some­thing deep­er and more mean­ing­ful than any­thing that has come before. You get the sense that Mor­gen, who was ini­tial­ly approached by Love back in 2007, has a gen­uine inter­est in under­stand­ing the man as opposed to sim­ply eulo­gis­ing the musician.

So how is it that this affec­tion­ate, metic­u­lous­ly craft­ed biog­ra­phy man­ages to feel so ungrat­i­fy­ing? Nir­vana drum­mer Dave Grohl is notable by his absence — accord­ing to Mor­gen, inter­viewed too late to be includ­ed in the final cut — but there’s some­thing else miss­ing. Cobain famous­ly hat­ed inter­views and his errat­ic, detached per­sona was per­ceived by many to be a defence mech­a­nism, a means of dis­tanc­ing him­self from the fame and adu­la­tion he felt was unde­served. To call him a reluc­tant spokesman for a gen­er­a­tion would be a fair­ly major under­state­ment, and as such you can’t help but feel like Cobain would have balked at the idea of a stranger pick­ing through his pri­vate life in an attempt to pro­vide both a com­pre­hen­sive descrip­tion of his cre­ative process and a defin­i­tive diag­no­sis of his condition.

It’s only through var­i­ous home video snap­shots that we get to glimpse some­thing approach­ing the real Kurt Cobain, but even here he reverts to state of child­like rever­ie, goof­ing around with Court­ney and an infant Frances. There’s no real talk, no despair­ing con­fes­sion­al or frank self-assess­ment. That footage sim­ply doesn’t exist. Even the way his friends and for­mer band mem­bers talk about Cobain sug­gests he rarely exposed him­self to those clos­est to him.

You could make 100 films about Cobain, from a mul­ti­tude of angles using the rich­est mate­r­i­al avail­able, and the out­come would be more or less the same. As an adult, both Cobain’s iden­ti­ty and the art he cre­at­ed were intrin­si­cal­ly linked to his men­tal ill­ness – not to men­tion his drug addic­tion — and while Mon­tage of Heck offers gen­uine insight into his for­ma­tive years, it’s the taint­ed pop­u­lar per­cep­tion of him that ulti­mate­ly survives.