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Cinema Review: Cobain--Montage of Heck ****

Lorna Irvine reviews a documentary that is 'lovingly made and impossible to resist'.

It's textbook stuff: hot young disaffected but talented rock star, unusually sensitive with mother and father issues, accidentally becomes spokesman for a generation but is ultimately destroyed by fame.

Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's rise and inevitable fall is another cliché, and although Morgen's film is as literal as the title (taken from a Cobain mix tape) in that it is one gigantic, almost entirely linear montage, it is lovingly made and impossible to resist.

Taking unseen footage of the young Kurt, from Aberdeen, right up to the home videos of the doting, yet drug-addled dad, the sense is one of a man who craved intimacy, having been rejected first by mother Wendy O' Connor (who seems to have naively thought motherhood would save her marriage) then father Don (who, along with his wife, Jennifer, seems a little odd, like something from a Christopher Guest film) but struggled with adult relationships. It is not hard to see why he acted out. This, compounded with alleged ADHD, stomach complaints and narcolepsy, never seems to have been properly addressed, and instead filtered through Nirvana's music, like the semi-autobiographical ‘Something in the Way’ and ‘Rape Me’.

What is refreshing about the film is that co-producer Frances Bean Cobain, Kurt's daughter, has ensured that her father is not deified. This is no mere hagiography. The account, for example, that Kurt gives on tape of attempting to lose his virginity to an overweight girl with learning difficulties is pretty repugnant. Widow Courtney Love's videos of them in the bathroom bickering about not playing away are so candid, in spite of being hilarious at times, that you can kind of see how the 90s Sid and Nancy comparisons were bandied around. And they do feel just a touch like over-sharing.

Yet, for all of this, Kurt's stinging one-liners (‘I like that... Just like Jerry Garcia...let's sprinkle some patchouli onto that’, ‘Emptee…Vee!’, etc) remind us how adorable and self-aware he could be. It's clear he and Courtney adored each other, in spite of the terrible outcome. Tracey Marander, his ex-girlfriend, comes across as immensely likeable, as does his sister Kim. Nirvana bandmate Krist, visibly shaken, talks movingly about not getting through to his friend. And Courtney... well, she is just Courtney...smart and easy to warm to, even if she is often a loudmouthed pain in the ass.

All of the music and drawings by Kurt, some of which are animated, coalesce into a greatest hits package of sorts. It's interesting to meditate on the fact the band were almost called 'Fecal Matter'--possibly not troubling the charts had they stuck to that one. More from brilliant debut album Bleach would have been nice, but there's ‘Territorial Pissings’, ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, their cover of ‘Molly's Lips’, ‘All Apologies’, ‘Lithium’,and, in one inspired segment, the anarchic cheerleader video for ‘(Smells Like) Teen Spirit’ with a gorgeously eerie children's choir over the top. It puts the song into an entirely new context.

All in all, Brett Morgen's film is as big on cognitive dissonance than an entire Woody Allen boxset: Kurt needed the money and the adulation but couldn't see it far enough. He didn't stand a chance.

Beautiful, terrible, enjoyably rollicking, ridiculously unfair. Such a loss. Textbook.

Cobain: Montage Of Heck (15) Directed by: Brett Morgen. Starring: Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Wendy O' Connor, Krist Novoselic

Kurt Cobain Montage of Heck Official Trailer 2015: http://youtu.be/_IBWbpJdRMQ

At Glasgow Film Theatre until April 16th.

www.glasgowfilm.org

Tags: cinema

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