Cobain: Montage of Heck
Watching “Cobain: Montage of Heck” was probably the first time in the 21 years since Kurt Cobain took his life that I had given any real thought to what kind of artist the Nirvana frontman would be were he still alive. The truth is, though, that I’m not sure we would ever really know, because it feels unlikely that Cobain would be alive today under any scenario. Yes, he had just had his daughter, Francis Bean Cobain, with wife Courtney Love just over a year and a half before he took his own life in April 1994, but “Montage of Heck” illuminates just how many demons and pains were going on in the singer/songwriter, who used heroin to the point of near overdose in 1993, in his short life, and I doubt he would have been able to right the ship even with more time with Francis. Brett Morgen (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”) wisely stops his film with Cobain’s death, and spends all 132 minutes of the documentary on his life, from his childhood torn between two parents, neither of which could really handle his rambunctious nature and personality, through to Nirvana’s inception in the late ’80s to their explosion in 1991 with the release of their album, “Nevermind,” and it’s signature song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The Seattle grunge rock scene produced other successful groups like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, but Nirvana, and Cobain, tapped into a sense of alienation and hopelessness that Generation X was feeling unlike any other artist. Angst was the Nirvana sound, and as we see animations and hear demos and listen to his parents talk about him, we feel like we understand better where that came from. It’s a riveting, heartbreaking journey to the soul of one of the most tortured, and brilliant, musical minds of any generation. It’s fitting that some of the final footage, and sounds, we hear are from Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged set, the posthumous release of which resulted in one of the greatest live albums of all-time. Hearing Cobain go acoustic on tracks like “All Apologies” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” makes for an unforgettable and haunting experience to this day. The music is as powerful as ever, while the lyrics howl with anguish that feels all the more like an artist who knew he had little time on this Earth, but still had one last thing to say. Morgen pays tribute to that spirit with his powerful look back at the defining artist of the early 1990s.
