Film
KURT COBAIN: ABOUT A SON This sounds horrific on paper: a 92-minute experimental documentary about the endlessly lionized “alternative” icon that doesn’t include a guitar lick of his music, a testimonial from anyone personally acquainted with the man, or even Cobain’s likeness—that is, until the final scene. Plus, the film’s director is A.J. Schnack, whose most notable credit is a rock doc about They Might Be Giants. It’s like entrusting James Dean’s legacy to a Don Knotts biographer. But in truth, producer Michael Azerrad was Kurt’s friend—at least as much as Truman Capote was a confidant of Perry Smith’s. In the early ’90s, Azerrad extensively interviewed the generational lodestar for the authorized biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, a project that left the reporter with 20-something hours of Cobain on tape. Schnack edited the audio into a kind of narration, and About a Son is essentially a dead rock star talking about his life for an hour-and-a-half. And it’s deeply moving. Azerrad caught his subject at a rather poignant moment. Frances Bean had just been born, grunge was a juggernaut, and Kurt was contemplative, candid and lucid—able to reflect on the factors that would inevitably kill him. “Drugs are bad for you, and they will fuck you up. I just knew that I would eventually stop doing them. Being married and having a baby is a really good incentive,” he says late in the film, concluding with a truly devastating line: “If I would’ve kept doing drugs, I would have lost everything.” Here Kurt Cobain, the supernatural songwriting god who discovered that the only true fountain of youth is death, is transmogrified into a mere mortal. This is About a Son’s singular, objective and real accomplishment. —Camille Dodero (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)
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