Cobain: Montage of Heck

The first documentary about Kurt Cobain made with access to the family archive. The material comes largely from Cobain himself: notebooks, drawings, audio recordings and home videos, much of it never published before. The title is taken from an audio collage he made. The structure is chronological: childhood in Aberdeen, his parents' divorce, finding nowhere in the town he could place himself, the founding of the band, fame on a scale nobody expected, and what followed. The difference is that it avoids interpretation. There is no narrator; the material speaks for itself. The drawings in his notebooks are animated and the audio recordings laid over those images. Among those who speak are his family, Krist Novoselic and Courtney Love. Dave Grohl does not appear in this first version. Brett Morgen directed and worked on it for eight years. It was produced with Cobain's daughter Frances Bean Cobain as an executive producer. An important record for anyone who likes music documentary and the rock history of the 1990s. Before you watch, know this: the film shows addiction and psychological collapse directly, and some of the home video footage is uncomfortable viewing.