Movie Review : Cobain - Montage of Heck (2015)

I was 11 years old when Kurt Cobain shot himself. He used to scare me a little, back then. He had such a transcendent presence, it was like he received transmissions from another world. I was afraid he would materialize in my bedroom in the middle of the night and stab me in the face. What can I say, I had an overflowing imagination. Time passed and Cobain never rose from the dead to terrorize me, though. He just never really died. Not in the public's eye. Our society is still obsessed with the death of Kurt Cobain, 21 years after the fact. It's because we can't let him go that movies like MONTAGE OF HECK are made. I'm not surprised it was showered with praise on release because it speaks more of our perception of Kurt Cobain than about the man himself.

MONTAGE OF HECK is not exactly a documentary. Consider it more like the ultimate romantic portrait of Kurt Cobain. It's the only way to watch the movie and not go mad if you actually know a thing or two about his life. There is surprisingly very little content to this movie. The only people interviewed are Cobain's parents, his sister, his first girlfriend Tracy and Krist Novoselic who keeps getting cutted like Donny in The Big Lebowski whenever he's about to piece together more than three sentences *. The rest of MONTAGE OF HECK is built out of audio clips of Cobain, animations based on his writings and drawings, and corny-ass animations of what it must have been like inside Kurt Cobain's head. The last 30 minutes are a particularly painful and meaningless montage of Kurt's domestic life with Courtney Love, like it was a chaotic bliss he decided to leave behind.

America is obsessed with the death of Kurt Cobain. He was an exceptional musician with a tormented heart that young people loved to see themselves in. We love to think he was swept away by this mysterious, romantic curse of the 27 year old musician, but we also seem to deliberately forget that his life is obscenely well documented and the reasons of his suicide are not that obscure: he refused to be deified. 

Being a rock star is as close as one gets to being a God in our society. When someone becomes bigger than what he does, we say: ''That guy, he's such a rock star.'' Kurt Cobain fucking hated being that and he felt extremely guilty about it. It's in his suicide note. Everything he said and done was sold as a tormented musician act, because it's what people wanted from him. Imagine being so fed up and tired that you show your penis to the cameras, break everything on stage and all you get are cheers. Cobain blew his freakin' brains out to get away from this life and it keeps pursuing him into the greater beyond because we can't accept that he didn't want what everybody wants. We prefer to think Courtney Love had him murdered of that he suffered from an intangible, poetic ailment.

There also are about 60 seconds worth of Richard Linklater style rotoscopic animations. Because Linklater's deep, man.

There are several key points of Kurt Cobain's life that were deliberately obfuscated to the sake of MONTAGE OF HECK's romantic angle. There are no interviews with Dave Grohl and Buzz Osborne, for example. How the fuck do you film a documentary about Kurt Cobain without even talking to Dave Grohl and by giving Krist Novoselic the Donny treatment? The official excuse is that Grohl was interviewed too late in the process to edit it in, but c'mon. If you make a movie about Kurt Cobain, you gotta feature the two people that actually shared his rise to stardom. Maybe director Brett Morgen just didn't like what Dave Grohl had to say. Maybe it just didn't fit his narrative. Most interview subject in this movie, including Cobain's own mother, see him through rose colored glasses because he was part of the most meaningful moment of their lives. 

Obfuscating the relationship to Buzz Osborne was particularly frustrating, because it's a key part in understanding who Kurt Cobain was and what he wanted to achieve in music. Now, Buzz has an outspoken distate for the movie, but the wrongness of not even mentioning him of his legendary band The Melvins goes beyond his (very good) argument. Buzz and Cobain were high school friends, and Cobain looked up to Buzz. Not only because he was older, he also was The Melvins as a paragon of musical integrity. Kurt Cobain was a musical purist. He was all about the work and he was terrified that changes in his social status would fuck that up, like most driven geniuses are. If Nirvana would've turned into a Melvins-like underground success, Kurt might still be alive today. MONTAGE OF HECK doesn't show that, though. It's really committed to the tortured poet cliché it is so enamored with.

The best way I can explain you how quitoxic MONTAGE OF HECK is goes like this: If you didn't know Nirvana had released IN UTERO prior to watching this documentary, you still wouldn't know after. It's such a fascinating story and an important part of Kurt Cobain's artistic torment, it's simply unbelievable it was just left out. MONTAGE OF HECK is oddly fascinating for that reason. It's not a movie about Kurt Cobain, it's a movie about how we desperately want to remember him. It's like being caught in the head of an obsessive Kurt Cobain stalker for two hours. I'm no Cobain nerd and the very humble knowledge I have of his life was enough for me to seriously question MONTAGE OF HECK. It's a manipulative and revisionist portrait of a groundbreaking musician who really didn't want this kind of adoring attention.

* I might be forgetting one, but I think this is all.