An authorized documentary on the late musician Kurt Cobain, from his early days in Aberdeen, Washington to his success and downfall with the grunge band Nirvana.
Like a Cobain mixtape brought to feral life, Montage is scruffy, sharp and insightful on an oft-explored subject. The pay-off is terribly moving – it’ll drain you.
Slightly overlong and glosses over certain aspects but a profound examination of a tortured artist.
Ultimately it's a film that didn't need this many bells and whistles for it to pack an almighty punch.
Fascinating yet almost inevitably self-defeating.
Brett Morgen's documentary about Nirvana rock star Kurt Cobain, who died aged 27 in 1994, is both extraordinarily intimate and strangely evasive.
Frustratingly, the film never properly discusses the most important subject: Cobain’s music – the extraordinary self-harming, self-dramatising rage in that gravelly voice that seductively switched from a roar to a plaintive murmur of devastatingly catchy tunefulness. It’s a real 90s time-capsule.
Though Cobain: Montage of Heck is unlikely to be the last word on the subject – the Nirvana legend is, ironically, far too lucrative now for that – it certainly deserves to be.
There’s no shortage of home movie footage of Kurt Cobain, but his brilliance is only revealed at the end of this padded-out documentary.
Kurt Cobain: One heck of a life
Brett Morgen on Getting to Know the Real Kurt Cobain
General release. Check local listings for show times.