How do you summon a ghost? How does one bring somebody back from the dead? In an age of hologram Shakurs, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck director Brett Morgen re-cuts and re-assembles Kurt Cobain’s most guarded possessions to damn near resurrect the Nirvana frontman.
The documentary, which premiered at Sundance, is fashioned from live concert footage and talking heads like Krist Novoselic and Cobain’s parents (an interview with former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl wasn’t edited in time for the final cut), however its central hook is the unwrapping of formerly private possessions. Paintings, notebook doodles, scrawled diary entries, half-recordings, sound experiments, candid photos, and home videos . The hook here is simple: see Cobain’s life like never before. And even considering the musician and tabloid subject’s meteoric rise as an unwitting youth icon of the early 90s, we’re still getting angry voicemails and footage of Cobain and widow Courtney Love shaving in the bathroom. The irony is Morgen is dissecting a figure who loathed fame’s sharp edges, bringing private pieces of a public life into light — albeit with the support of executive producers Love and daughter Francis Bean Cobain. It’s the final tragedy in a career full of them, and it’s a grand one.
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck begins with Nirvana’s 1992 Reading headliner and an eerie telegraphing of Cobain’s eventual suicide as the lead singer sprawls out and goes on the stage floor, feigning immobility in a bright blonde wig. From there, time rewinds to Cobain’s childhood in Aberdeen, WA, chronic illnesses, relationships, success, more illness, and more success. Several festival selections from this year included, too many documentaries fail to justify their feature-length running times but here, Montage of Heck is interested in engaging with its material. Morgen animates paintings and sculptures for a macabre enlivening of cartoon doodles and skeleton artwork. Nirvana songs get re-arranged through choir covers and chamber orchestras, and interpolated rotoscope sequences reanimate Cobain’s voice memos of divorce and teenage discontent. (Think A Scanner Darkly, only narrated by Philip K. Dick.)
For the whirlwind of crap Montage of Heck‘s title brings to mind, Morgen wastes no time extemporizing on said crap, lifting from PSA footage and Gen X commercials in his opening titles. Later intertextual conversations –conversations between rejected poems and hindsight interviewees claiming to have predicted grunge’s self-imploding successes — are eventually cut short by Cobain’s death. Brett Morgen has resurrected the musician’s spirit like some shaman of cinema, entreating an impossible dialogue with Cobain only to have his resurrection’s flame cut out (almost) as abruptly. It’s a conclusion doubly tragic for its textual recreation and fittingly appropriate.