Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

Dir: Brett Morgen

2015

***

All these years after the passing of one of the world’s most renowned musicians, it is nice to see a document of Kurt Cobain that doesn't fixate on his death, but rather focuses on his life. Brett Morgen's Montage of Heck looks at Cobain's childhood and how he learned to escape from his troubled world by being creative. As well as being a musician, young Cobain would also paint and write and Montage of Heck is a collective collage of his visual, audio and literary creations. The soundtrack is a mix of audio recordings, paintings, poem and diary entries from childhood to adulthood, with interviews from close family and friends, animated reconstructions of his childhood and Super 8 family recordings from the 60s and 70s, as well as unseen Nirvana footage and unreleased songs and samples. I was a huge Nirvana fan and like many, it moulded what I like and what I listen to today. The band's cultural impact is undeniable and it all came from a troubled child from middle-America and a victim of divorce. I don't deny this but I think there is way more to the story than is revealed. This is the first documentary about the singer that has had the full cooperation of his close family and friends. Kurt's ex-wife Courtney Love approached director Brett Morgen with the idea back in 2007 and he had full access to the family’s records and collection of everything Kurt created. The family are rarely critical of each other in interviews and never do they take blame for Kurt's demise. It's really not much of a documentary in this respect, everything said could be taken with a pinch of salt. This is really more of a look at the man, what made him tick and ultimately what stopped him ticking. There are parts of Kurt's childhood I'm sure he'd like to forget, yet here they are reconstructed in beautiful animation. There are endless narrations of things he wrote in his darker days and video footage of him and Courtney in all their depravity. The film is overlong and far too existential in places and I think the film has the opposite of the desired effect. I will always love Nevermind but I like the legend a lot less than I used to. Great songs, but you have to wonder if he really deserved his notoriety. This leads to the unspoken idea that everyone is great when they're dead, the immortalization of the 27 club and the ridiculous notion of being cool to die so young. Old footage of Kurt suggesting that it is all an unpleasant fallacy rings true and suddenly I wasn't sure what I was watching or why I was watching it. He was or course right and I suddenly became uninterested and rather repelled by the rest of the film. Credit due to the unseen footage and what must have been an exhausting editing experience but truth is that this Nirvana fan now likes Nirvana a little less for watching it.