Kurt Cobain About a Son 2 1/2 stars
Directed by AJ Schnack
Elements you will not find in the experimental documentary Kurt Cobain About a Son include: any of Cobain’s music; footage of him or his band, Nirvana, doing anything; interviews with his friends, family, associates or anyone connected with Cobain or Nirvana; any documents or photographs relevant to the time period and events covered by the film, at least until just before the closing credits. What you will get are essentially two things: Cobain’s unadorned voice, culled from hours of interview tapes recorded by journalist Michael Azerrad for his 1993 book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana; and a series of impressionistic images of Cobain’s native Pacific Northwest, created by director Schnack as a vague thematic counterpoint to Cobain’s words.
While Schnack creates an often beautiful photo essay on life in Seattle and its environs, his images add little to the words we hear Cobain speaking, and only underscore the frustration in our inability to get a full sense of what’s being discussed. When Cobain talks about the joy of playing club shows in Nirvana’s early days, we don’t see video or even still photographs of the band doing just that—instead we get some nameless group of musicians, artfully shot but ultimately signifying nothing.
Throughout the film there is a maddening lack of context—Cobain’s name is never mentioned (not even in an opening title), and events in the band’s career and Cobain’s life are glossed over or omitted. Anyone coming to this film without a solid working knowledge of Cobain and Nirvana will be hopelessly lost, although possibly distracted by the pretty pictures. At the same time, a lot of what Cobain says is fascinating, and the intimate interviews—with their background noise of eating and TV-watching and even at one point Courtney Love asking Cobain to prepare a bottle for their daughter—are touching and sad. If only they’d been used as the basis for a real story, rather than this oblique exercise in pretentiousness.