It’s frustrating to sit down for a documentary about an
artist and find a product only interested in repeating the conventional wisdom.
We’ve had a run of these about bands and musicians lately. No matter the level
of access, authorized or unauthorized status, or the good intentions of the
filmmakers, it’s total boredom to find a film ostensibly about a musician’s
life content to repeat the highlights like some Behind the Music episode masquerading as cinema. I don’t want to
see one more stuffy procession of talking heads and overfamiliar archival
footage reinforcing the brand’s public persona, all the while assuring fans
“this music meant something, man,”
without digging into what actually made the work under consideration special.
Luckily, documentarian Brett Morgen’s Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck isn't that. It decides to strip out grand
pronouncements and even some basic context to get a two-hour psychological
portrait of the man in question. If you show up to the movie without even a
vague understanding of Cobain’s career and public image – fronting seminal rock
band Nirvana, hitting it big with the 1991 album Nevermind, marrying fellow grunge icon Courtney Love, and dying at
age 27 – you could be a little lost in the movie’s largely present-tense
collage of sound and image. Morgen had access to home movies, concert footage, interviews,
cassette tapes of Cobain’s early sound experiments, press clippings, and
notebooks full of doodles and lyrics. Out of this material he paints a picture
of the inside of Cobain’s head, energetic and troubled.
In doing so, he keeps the focus on the man behind the icon.
Candid interviews step outside the interiority with Cobain’s mother, father,
stepmother, friends, exes, and Love, who reveal intimate details of an
energetic, curious, artistic troublemaker. Casual footage of a kid growing up
in the 70s mix with recounted childhood memories of hyperactive disorders that
gave way to moody teen years. In a moving flourish, Morgen provides animated
recreations of Cobain’s disaffected, depressed, frustrated rebellious teen
years, narrated beyond the grave by an archival interview and scored with a
plaintive instrumental strings-heavy “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” By the time
Nirvana emerges fully formed, the kid, now in his twenties, has managed to
channel his punk rage into punk rock, grungy guitars smashing into the mix of
score and oldies on the soundtrack, hammering home the revelation the band was
to culture at the time.
There’s little to no room for analysis of the band’s sound,
explanation of contracts and practice sessions, studio time, music video sets, or
Billboard charts. Those images fly by in a swirl, background noise to the story
of a young man whose sudden success gets him better drugs, and bigger
insecurities. Montage of Heck rattles
impressionistically along a sadly familiar rise-and-fall pattern that brings a
talented individual great success and greater access to his fatal flaws. All
the while, we can hear how effectively he channeled inner pain into catchy rock.
Played loud, the movie is melancholy exuberance, the speakers booming with
now-classic high-energy songs – like “Come as You Are” and “All Apologies” –
while we see an increasingly gaunt Cobain slump away into addiction. The footage
is at times uncomfortably intimate, unsparing in disquieting candor. We see
rollicking concerts, but also a man slipping into heroin while his baby burbles
nearby.
Morgen’s greatest accomplishment
is recognizing comprehensive, extensively reported biography is the realm of
books. To make nonfiction film about public figures is not to dryly bombard with
only facts, but to generate an experience that captures something of their
essence. In Montage of Heck, the raw
material of Cobain’s creative output is mashed up into a dizzying – tiresome,
at times – two hour firehose of sound and image. (Morgen’s skilled at evoking
immediacy through old footage, like in other great docs, the visceral Chicago 10 and hypnotic June 17th, 1994.) The film is fast, freewheeling, prone to flights of visual fancy,
a sustained exposure to an approximation of one man’s mind. One can see what
made him an artist, see what hurt him, and see his tortured propensity for
damaging behavior. It is not the ultimate, definitive word on his life. But it
is an involving, immediate, evocative exercise in mental archeology, digging up
some empathetic, heartbreaking, and troubling conclusions about what it must’ve
been like to be Kurt Cobain.
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