The anticipation surrounding 'Cobain: Montage Of Heck's release at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was not unfounded.
This is not a Nirvana documentary and Kurt Cobain is not just the poster-boy of an apathetic generation. Director Brett Morgen was given the keys to Kurt’s archives and chose to interview the five people closest to him. Courtney Love and Francis Cobain’s involvement might explain why Dave Grohl wasn’t interviewed, but Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic provides a solid bandmate perspective.
Family interviews and early Super-8 home videos show a side of Kurt never seen before: the angelic middle-American boy who became the rebellious product of a new breed of suburban dystopia. The first ever interview with his father is stoic yet affecting.
Candid home movies of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love show the lustful relationship they had behind closed doors. The arrival of their daughter Francis Bean and the media’s condemnation of their junkie lifestyle create an interesting juxtaposition of their private and public personas; the focus ultimately pulling toward the private.
In an interview with Brett Morgen (included in the special features) he tells of garnering inspiration from the animation in the 1982 film 'Pink Floyd - The Wall'. Hisko Hulsing’s painterly animations add moody embellishment to Cobain’s cassette-recorded narratives and unreleased demos.
There is a lot of artistic post-production: different versions of Nirvana songs are cut with malleable archive footage and pages of his scrawled journals and artworks spring to life on screen. It’s almost like you’re in Kurt’s three-dimensional scrapbook.
'Cobain: Montage Of Heck' sensitively closes the final chapter of Kurt Cobain; paying homage to an overtly expressionistic artist who craved acceptance and normalcy, but attracted the opposite.
'Cobain: Montage Of Heck' is available now.
