Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, HBO’s latest documentary, considers the discordant personal and career arc of Kurt Cobain – lead singer of ’90s grunge band Nirvana. Clearly, it’s a fascinating topic for a documentary, all at once ruminating on isolation, alienation, and parenthood, before finally, and most tragically, suicide. The cast of characters (well, they are real people, but you get the idea) is wide and diverse, though Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love, and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic comprise the bulk of the interviews; they both have plenty of introspection around Kurt. The real problem for the film is it is tremendously burdened by oddball asides. In trying to make a film that felt like Kurt, they really forgot to tell the story of Kurt. I get the instinct, but parts of it come off like an unwatchable science fair project. Maybe it’s the documentary Kurt would have made about himself … but then we’d have a name for it: vanity project.
The film starts off odd … but cool. Two quick moments happen, the first of which is Cobain riffing off a couple lyrics from “The Rose” – about as sentimental a song as possible, the polar opposite of everything Nirvana brought to the table. We also hear from Kurt’s sister, who realized early on that Cobain’s brain “never stopped thinking”. We’re then ushered down the normal biodoc fare, “Hey, he was a kid!” and “He loved to perform!”, paint by numbers documentary style that could have been taken from almost any musician’s upbringing. More interesting were the troubled times for Kurt in Aberdeen. Learning his dad was a jerk, and that he was kicked out of his mom’s house, then his dad’s house, then his grandparent’s house, then his uncle’s house, all before finally moving back in with his mom instantly made his personality make sense. Furthermore, seeing clips from a movie he liked, Over the Edge, was enlightening.
Then the wheels sorta come off. There’s plenty of material for Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck to work with, they’ve got his diaries, drawings, personal home videos, personal recordings, plus people who knew him, really there’s a treasure trove to choose from. The film takes all of this and pretty much throws it in a blender. Here’s what Kurt wrote, along with a funny animation! Here’s a weird recording of Kurt talking to no one, but we made an animation for it! Now let’s make one of his drawings COME ALIVE! It all plays as though the makers of the film didn’t know what to make of Kurt Cobain either, but instead of just presenting information they went with entertaining, which, in this case, was death to actual quality.
The film is entertaining, but only in the sense of a bunch of bright lights. There were many times they clearly were just throwing a cacophony of sound at the screen and just hoping to make an audience feel uncomfortable. You know, LIKE KURT. But this is absurd, and frankly Kurt, and the art he created, deserved better than a “hell, just throw everything we’ve got at the wall” method.
At over two hours Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck borrows heavily from “trippy” films such as A Scanner Darkly and Howl. Creepy animation, creepier words, and very little actual insight to the real person that was Kurt Cobain. The Courtney Love interviews were the strongest bits of the documentary, because she didn’t come off as desperately needing to be “cool”. The moments between Love and Cobain that were shown were silly, depressing, weird, and interesting. They were the parts with the depth the rest of the movie couldn’t quite live up to.
There are good parts as well, clearly, and I’ve already mentioned a few. The level of access is strong, likely because Kurt’s daughter was involved, though they either couldn’t get or didn’t try for Dave Grohl‘s inclusion – likely due to his running war with Courtney Love. There are a few nuggets of informational gold too, Kurt saying to Courtney that he just wanted to make $3 million dollars and then retire to become a junkie. Or seeing the reported hate for Guns ‘N Roses play out on the couple’s home videos. The score of the documentary also features stripped down, xylophone-style Nirvana songs – think about the trailer from The Social Network. Those were very effective at setting tone. But overall? It’s not enough.
The thing is, Kurt himself was a perfectionist musician. Lost in the mythos of flannel and grunge is the rather relevant fact that Nirvana’s music was nothing like their personas. Loose and slackery? Umm, no. A look at Cobain’s cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” shows a coiled snake of a musician:
As such, while it’s rational to look at the mess of the man, it misses what actually made him special. It wasn’t the messiness or the incoherent heroin-induced rambles – it was the focused precision of a band hellbent on creating their own sound. Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain, were stellar musicians, the lyrics and taut arrangements made them stand out in a decade full of also rans. That the film only wants to show us that Kurt was different, or cool, or addled, or crazy, lessens the impact of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. There are plenty of crazy people in the world, but there was only one Kurt Cobain. It would have been awfully nice to see a story about that guy.
