Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

Brett Morgen’s documentary finally gives Kurt Cobain the film he deserves.

The legacy of the last legendary rock star we’ll ever have (thanks, dying music industry) has been tarnished on the silver screen by those more interested in barmy conspiracy theories surrounding his death, and whatever the hell Last Days was meant to be. Even fairer assessments, like in Foo Fighters: Back and Forth, dwelled on Kurt Cobain as a tragic figure.

Montage of Heck balances well between Kurt Cobain, the troubled mind, and Kurt Cobain, the artist. The film celebrates his creativity; whose angst and disillusionment and basic goals of achieving contentment and copious amounts of sex spoke to a generation of kids who grew up living under a Reaganist cloud. Nothing Kurt did was especially genius or virtuous, but he arrived when most teenagers felt completely detached from the Sunset Strip cocaine-shovelling, glam rock antics portrayed on MTV.

Yet Kurt Cobain’s journals, previously released as a book, show his unstable personality. Montage of Heck exhibits these private thoughts over discordant guitar feedback and quick-fire gory animations. Sometimes the juvenile nature of the drawings reflect what a child may draw on their school desk. It becomes clear Cobain kept his real thoughts and emotions within him. He disdained interviews, often sabotaging them by dressing goofily and stating the music should speak for itself. In rare moments of recorded emotional clarity, like in the answering machine messages to Victoria Clark, his vocal inflexion contains a severe discomfort with confrontational behaviour.

In typical HBO music documentary fashion, Montage of Heck contextualises by going back to the very beginning. We see super 8 films and photographs of Kurt as a baby; adored by those around him, the centre of the family as they celebrate birthdays and Christmases together. But his later problems are rooted in there, from having his hyperactivity dulled by Ritalin, followed by the divorce of his parents that shamed and humiliated him for the rest of his life. His extended family passed him around like an unwanted gift until he was a drug-addicted, high-school dropout. His recollections of almost jumping off a bridge and lying down on railroad tracks suggest, if the underground music scene hadn’t found him, Kurt Cobain would’ve never survived past childhood.

The interviews with his family are telling. His mother and father, whose respective pessimistic and Mr Moustache personalities are fingerprinted all over Nirvana’s work, still blame each other for Kurt’s upbringing twenty years after his death. Their destructive separation led to Kurt’s search for a family of his own despite his lack of maturity. When people speak of Courtney Love’s overbearing, dominant personality somehow tainting him, they forget his gestures such as getting the crowd at Reading Festival ’92 to chant: “We love you, Courtney!” He was madly and deeply in love with her as, although she was a heroin junkie, Courtney represented a return to the nuclear family normality he lost at the age of nine. Love reels off her usual farfetched statements here (taking heroin while pregnant is okay if you’re built like an ox, apparently), but nothing goes against the narrative of Cobain and Love as young lovers whose intense relationship would’ve burned out if he had stayed alive.

The film ends abruptly a week before April 5th, 1994. Director Brett Morgen makes an interesting choice by avoiding Cobain’s suicide and the aftermath, motivated by how the film serves as a document of his life. Kurt Cobain, to many, is more famous as the rockstar who killed himself than being the writer of Smells Like Teen Spirit, Come as You Are, and Lithium; to dwell on it would buy into the media-spun romanticised tragedy. Cutting the film immediately after the MTV Unplugged rendition of Where Did You Sleep Last Night is poignant because Nirvana were at the height of their creativity and tabloid intrigue at that moment. Everyone was wondering what Kurt Cobain and Nirvana would do next. And then it was over. Gone. Just like that.

Montage of Heck takes Kurt Cobain’s personal diaries, drawings, home videos, and recordings and reverses the mythology of him built up in the last twenty years. He was the reluctant spokesman for Generation X, but he never rose above his fans. Like them, he was bewildered, bearing the wounds of his upbringing, simply trying to express himself and rebel in a world out of step with his own reality.