Cobain doc gets Lantern showing

(Posted Wednesday) 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. Here’s 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. 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.

The film 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.

“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 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.

Nathan Weinbender