Kurt Cobain, In His Own Words
Documentary Shows Artist's Focus, Ambition

By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 26, 2007

It's hard to believe that a film could be made about Kurt Cobain that would have something of value to add to his already over-mythologized life and death, but "Kurt Cobain About a Son" is just that film, as important for what it reveals about a seminal and grievously misunderstood artist as for how it rejuvenates the moribund rock documentary form.

AJ Schnack, working with 25 hours of interviews conducted in 1992 and 1993 by Michael Azerrad for his Nirvana book "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana," has made something beautiful, poetic and honest in "Kurt Cobain About a Son," a film narrated by Cobain himself as he shares with Azerrad his happy years growing up in Aberdeen, Wash.; his natural affinity for art and music; his early ambition (and abiding love for the slick pop hook); and finally the paralyzing stomach pain that he claimed drove him to self-medication with heroin.

Continually throughout these candid, often lively, sometimes feisty monologues, Cobain returns to the primal wound of his life: his parents' divorce when he was 8, which brought his childhood idyll to a sudden and searing end.

As Cobain speaks, gorgeous images of Aberdeen -- as well as Olympia and Seattle, where Cobain eventually lived -- play across the screen, accompanied by the music that influenced him (Queen played a surprising early role). Schnack's most inspired choice, and the decision that vaults "Kurt Cobain About a Son" into the realm of art, is never to feature an image of Cobain, or one of Nirvana's songs, to go with the narration, resulting in a densely layered evocation of the man speaking rather than a dull, on-the-nose illustration.

In addition to breathtaking footage of urban and rural landscapes, cinematographer Wyatt Troll, working entirely in 35mm film (and with some line-drawing animation thrown in), captures quiet, meditative portraits of the area's inhabitants, who seem unconsciously to reflect Cobain's own changes as he grew from a self-imagined "alien" and "geek" to uneasy hipster and misanthropic superstar.

Cobain's story of himself occasionally can be as self-serving as enlightening; a sequence in which Cobain complains about how the press treated his marriage to Courtney Love and her subsequent pregnancy goes on way too long. A moment late in the film, when Love can be heard sweetly asking Cobain to bring up a Similac bottle when he's done talking, gives lie to her image as the harridan who ruined his life.

But Schnack's narrative approach -- at once literal and oblique -- achieves the nearly impossible feat of adding something genuinely new to a story that could easily have been lost in a haze of talking heads and hagiography. (Schnack's more straight-ahead, previous film was "Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns," about the New York duo They Might Be Giants.)

We know too well how Kurt Cobain's story ends. For its part, the film finishes on a heartbreaking note, as Azerrad and Cobain sign off with an offhanded "see ya later" and we finally see the images of the man we've gotten to know, all the more startling for their subtle timing.

But what's memorable about this remarkable film is all that's gone before, especially in its demystification of the idea of Cobain as a tortured artist. What becomes clear in his own reminiscences is how ambitious, focused and self-directed he was from the time he heard his first Beatles album and decided to become a rock star.

The fact that his dream came true is no accident: It was the result of the kind of unromantic hard work that is so often obscured by artistic biography. While "Kurt Cobain About a Son" goes a long way toward setting that and other matters straight, it succeeds just as much as an artistic experiment -- the film equivalent of bricolage -- that is exponentially more vivid and absorbing than the garden-variety rock-doc or biopic. "Kurt Cobain About a Son" is a must for anyone who still loves Cobain, or harbors hope for the future of documentary portraiture.

Kurt Cobain About a Son (97 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is not rated. It contains profanity, brief nudity and material concerning drug use.