In the days following Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, I don’t remember candlelight vigils, black armbands, or crying classmates at my high school. I remember my mom vacuuming. Specifically, vacuuming while I was trying to watch MTV for updates from Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren in between airings of Nirvana’s appearance on Unplugged.
I also don’t remember feeling all that sad, but definitely confused. No one had ever died that I followed this closely — with the possible exception of River Phoenix six months earlier — so this was uncharted territory. I was used to older celebrities dying, but Cobain’s death was the first one of someone I read about, wanted to watch on TV, and spent my money on.
Over the past 20-plus years since that weekend, my feelings towards Cobain have moved from that initial confusion to a few years of thinking he was a selfish asshole, and more recently a feeling that Cobain was a sad, troubled man who never fully received the love he needed from friends or family. As a father and a man who has battled depression myself, I feel like I understand portions of what Cobain was going through, but I will never understand the full picture.
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck gives us a slightly better view into the world of Cobain, and the troubles he faced on an almost daily basis from a stomach ailment, his deep addiction to heroin, and suddenly being the most famous musician in the world.
It’s not a pretty picture, and Montage of Heck — which gets its title from a recording Cobain made in 1988 — is dark and almost too hectic at times. It combines archival footage and photographs, music from Cobain and Nirvana, animation, and interviews — both for the documentary by family and friends, and by music journalists with Nirvana during their prime — into a beautiful mess.
Director Brett Morgen told an audience at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last month that he wanted to keep the film “intimate.” He accomplished this by keeping his interviews short and sparse without a need to include everyone. But an obvious missing participant is Dave Grohl. Morgen let Cobain — through his own recordings, writings, and a voiceover from a recorded interview with Rolling Stone’s David Fricke — tell his own story.
The story Morgen puts together with the help of Cobain in Montage of Heck isn’t entirely unknown to fans of Cobain or Nirvana, but we’ve rarely heard it in Cobain’s own voice. The amateur recordings Cobain made in his pre-Nevermind life give us a hint that he was a man with boundless ideas needing to be released. Once Nevermind changed everything, Cobain’s story is suddenly not his own; it becomes the story created by journalists interviewing a disenfranchised Cobain, and the “close friends” willing to give a quote.
If the first half of Montage of Heck is Cobain surviving the trials of life and eventually becoming a rock god, the second half is Cobain retreating into the dark depths of heroin, even as he obtains the one goal that had always eluded him: a family. Pulled together from home movies — some recorded by Hole bassist Eric Erlandson — this portion of the documentary focuses on Cobain’s relationship with Courtney Love and their daughter Frances Bean, who also served as an executive producer for Montage of Heck.
This is not an easy documentary to watch, but this portion is particularly difficult. We see a man who appears to be happy, but who we also know is tipping closer and closer to the edge. Once Frances is born, Cobain becomes a doting and loving father, doing anything for a laugh from Frances even as he nears the end of his life.
The end of Cobain’s life is not the focus of Montage of Heck, but instead his accomplishments — Nirvana, Frances Bean — take center stage. These achievements in Cobain’s life ultimately leave the viewer feeling a bit sad as the credits roll. Sad for what these past 20 years might have been with Cobain, a man with stories still to tell, writing in his journal, playing guitar, and raising a daughter.
