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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Harrowing Cobain documentary opens Friday at the Magic Lantern

Nathan Weinbender

Although it premiered on HBO in May, Brett Morgen’s documentary “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” is now getting a theatrical run. You can see the film about the late Nirvana frontman at the Magic Lantern starting Friday, and this release reportedly features a previously unheard Cobain demo on its soundtrack. Below is an excerpt from my review of the film, which originally aired on Spokane Public Radio:

Few artists who emerged in the last half of the 20th century have been mythologized, scrutinized and lionized quite like Kurt Cobain. We remember him as a tortured genius, as the godfather of the grunge movement, as a vocal resister of corporate rock, and we tend to forget that he was also just a guy.

Brett Morgen’s “Montage of Heck” isn’t the first documentary to put Cobain’s life and death under a microscope, though it is the first do so with the participation of his family (Cobain’s daughter Frances Bean served as an executive producer, and his wife Courtney Love is interviewed). To say the film humanizes Cobain might suggest that it’s blindly reverential, but it is not: We come to understand him as a man scarred by rejection, terrified of humiliation and undone by addiction, and whose 1994 suicide was probably unavoidable. It’s one of the most unflinching, harrowing portraits of a renowned cultural figure ever made.

This isn’t, however, a standard film biography that sits us down and patiently explains Cobain’s legacy. Sure, we get talking head interviews, concert footage and archival material, but Morgen’s approach is more experimental and cerebral. He’s not too concerned with the whats and whens of Cobain’s life, and a lot of basic expository details are completely glossed over. Anyone with only a passing familiarity of him and his music are likely to be left dazed and confused.

“Montage of Heck” gets its title from a “Revolution 9”-type audio collage Cobain made before he was famous, an eerie patchwork of seemingly random snippets from records and TV shows, and the movie adopts the same approach to both sound and image. This is almost a mixed media art piece, leaning heavily on Cobain’s drawings and journal entries and visualizing certain chapters of his life in animation, including a gripping sequence in which Cobain himself grimly details a failed suicide attempt when he was a teenager.

Many of Cobain’s fans have tried to rationalize his suicide, since it seemed unfathomable that someone so successful and effortlessly talented could have ever been unhappy. “Montage of Heck” does a masterful job of illustrating just how messy and unforgiving Cobain’s world was, and it becomes quite apparent that it wasn’t the fame that killed him but the scrutiny that came with it. Morgen (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”) hasn’t set out to inform in the conventional sense but to capture the turbulence of a life, and in doing so he’s made a film that is, like Cobain’s music, often visceral in its impact.

Below: The trailer for “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.”