Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Too many modern Rock and music documentaries live in the moment; they are stifled by the effects of the past and constricted by image. The opposite is perhaps arguably true of the biopic, one that in many ways glamorises the person involved, certain areas of life, of thoughts and deeds airbrushed out, spoken as if acting as a token, a memento in which the picture doesn’t want to go down a certain route but invites the viewer to do it on their own but no staging post of reference to the impact on other significant lives.
Cobain: Montage of Heck not only changes that flat feeling offered by so many before it, it radically destroys it, it smashes it to smithereens and leaves a trail of cinematic destruction in its wake.
The life of Kurt Cobain has perhaps been idolised over since he decided to end the suffering that he felt, a man who became, whether he wanted to or not, and on evidence that the film caught, he most certainly didn’t, a voice for a generation, disengaged, disenfranchised and despairing of any real hope in a world that had been saved from the ideological political cold war any longer but for whom the war on their own grip of Western culture, of making their way in a world ever more tilted to an extreme and for those who were there felt no place left for them.
Kurt Cobain has been called many things, certainly since he took his own life in 1994 but a spokesman for the disenfranchised is perhaps, despite not wanting it, the most apt. Like Ginsberg, Kerouac, Jim Morrison and countless others, Kurt Cobain embodied a spirit of rebellion, of revolution but one that was shrouded in his own personal destruction. One that gave ultimately one of the top twenty albums of the 1990s and one that saw the man broken by wave after wave of personal abuse, of systematic rejection and a man who, like Jim Morrison, was a poet at heart but stuck in the body of a musician.
Cobain: Montage of Heck has that incredibly rare twin aspiration of being almost so truthful, that reels of it may be viewed as being so raw and passionate, of being painful and being skinned alive in a ritualistic sense of barbarity, to the overwhelming highs that created Nevermind, that saw him try to tackle the demons, but which perhaps with inevitability, led further to his own destruction.
The film features comments from those that would always be expected to be interviewed; their insight of certain passages of time helpful to understand what went on in the mind of the young man. The haunted look in his father’s eyes but of a man arguably who wished he may have been able to understand himself, through to his fellow band mate Krist Novoselic and the montages with his wife Courtney Love all reveal deep psychological trauma that play in the mind long after leaving the cinema. Most revealing of all though is that Nirvana’s Dave Grohl, one of the best and hard-working musicians in rock today, only appears through old television footage. It gives rise that not all is ever said and done about such human beings, those gifted with the genius, of having their mind looking at the world through a different spectrum, it also suggests that quite rightly, sometimes to leave a man in peace, to leave the fan’s perception of the idol, is to hold him in higher esteem.
There is a new bar to be placed when it comes to the Rock documentary, Cobain: Montage of Heck, is one that sits with great pleasure and terrible sadness to be able to watch, a true classic.
Ian D. Hall