Country:
United Kingdom
Recognizable Faces:
Kurt Cobain
Courtney Love
Dylan Carlson
Larry Flynt
Directed By:
Nick Broomfield
Before I say anything on Kurt & Courtney, you have to understand it in context. British filmmaker Nick Broomfield came in to Seattle with a budget and an idea, shedding a little light on the circumstances of Kurt Cobain's death. Legit enough, but he found a big roadblock to his ambitions in the person of Courtney Love. She had (has) nothing to gain from making the suicide of her husband look like anything else than a poetic act of artistic despair. Broomfield lost his funding and ended up doing a very D.I.Y project who takes a lot of free pot shots at Courtney Love without ever proving anything. Fifteen years after his death, Kurt Cobain doesn't seem any closer to be resting in peace. He found a place right up there with Elvis, Marylin Monroe and James Dean in the pantheon of eternally tormented icons.
I'm not too sure what I expected to find, but here's how Broomfield worked. He went to Seattle and interviewed everybody involved with Kurt from the moment he started recording music to after his death. It starts off very well, with interviews with Kurt's aunt (who initiated him to music), his teacher who picked him up from the street at a young age and his ex-girlfriends who said he was so embarrassed by being skinny that he wore an indecent amount of clothing layers. This is all great stuff that help me understand the tortured nature of Nirvana's music. The early stuff about Courtney Love is also great. The interview with her ex-boyfriend, telling about her abusive nature, the poems she wrote, the letter she wrote to her dad from the correction school, saying: "I've been on my way here all my life". Hank Harrison, Courtney Love's father, is visibly troubled and estranged from his daughter, but he's showing some hard evidence that Courtney isn't very stable (or should I saw "already wasn't" because her instability is a known fact in Hollywood). But thirty minutes in, the movie shits the bed.
The major problem of Kurt & Courtney lies in credibility. Every person that Broomfield interviews, involved in Kurt's death, is extremely shady. First, the interviews are uselessly long, so the number of people interviewed is small, and they are all people aching for glory and camera time. Eldon "El Duce" Hoke, Hank Harrison, Tom Grant, the private investigator that vowed to proved Kurt was murdered. What about the police? We had a one second glimpse at the report. The mainstream journalists that covered the affair? The only journalist interviewed were back alley paparazzi. What happened, I think, is that Broomfield showed up in Seattle and Los Angeles without a game plan and interviewed anybody that wanted to talk to the camera (which is a hard task since Courtney Love terrorizes everybody). He had no intentions to give his film credibility or any sort of weight. Kurt & Courtney nestled in the moral grey zone of controversy, without even looking to make a point.
That said, Kurt & Courtney isn't completely bad. It's not a strong documentary, but it's throwing some interesting ideas to the table. The portrait Nick Broomfield draws of Courtney Love is the one of an angry girl, with an undying will to succeed, but not the talent to back it up. Kurt & Courtney is a testimony to those lives she wrecked on the way to reach the sacro-saint image of Hollywood starlet by the mid-nineties. Look at the images of Courtney on the red carpet, always living up to the most extreme images of stardom: the broken princess with the white dress and the cigarette, the Oscar diva, the goth queen, etc. She's a precursor to the Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and other useless princesses of Hollywood. Of course she's darker and edgier, but everything was in the nineties. I grew up with Phil Anselmo and Bruce Willis, but now kids do with that Nickelback hair guy and Paul Walker.
What really sucked about Kurt & Courtney was that it didn't make any point about Kurt Cobain, his music or his death. It's another work that Courtney Love sucked the life out of.
SCORE:64%
