Kurt Cobain: About a Son

I just saw this at the Toronto Film Festival and I wasn't impressed.

While I appreciate the audio interviews captured within this film, I question why a movie was made. I would have enjoyed the film as much if listened to on the way home while I was in traffic. It should have been a CD release, not a film.

The film revolves around some audio recordings that were compiled from a series of late night interviews. There were very intimate details described by Cobain, including how he did care about what people thought about him (as opposed to what most of his friends suggested), and that he wanted to write some pop songs for their albums, but Sub Pop forced them into keeping the albums underground. Some may already be aware of these facts, but I enjoyed learning of them for the first time. The tone in which Cobain spoke felt genuine, and the pacing of the interviews was perfect. These interviews deserve to be heard by any fan of Cobain's, or Nirvana. They were a great listen.

The problem with this film is there isn't a single video clip or photo of Cobain, his family, or Nirvana until the last 30 seconds of the movie. The entire film involves a series of related images that play based on the interviews. An example would be when speaking on his father's job, they show footage of men working at a lumber yard. When Cobain spoke on Seattle, they'd show images of Seattle Record stores, streets and highways. They even had real time images being drawn in the form of artsy cartoons (tree's and grass swaying) during some of the vocals. It was like watching on LONG Fruitopia commercial combined with a film strip about Washington. Unfortunately it also seemed like they had problems clearing for use in this movie.

I understand what the director attempted with the images, but it failed in my eyes. It's almost like they brainstormed how they could generate the most revenue from the interviews, as opposed to having a vision upon hearing them. It feels forced, and I don't need to see this again. Literally. If I ever end up with a copy of the DVD I'll either record the audio to CD, or listen to it with the TV off.

Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana before his untimely death, is often credited by music experts as being one of the most influential musicians of his time. A claim that careful analysis demonstrates to have much credence. Yet he seemed an unremarkable individual. Physical and mental illness. Dropping out of high school. Habitual drug-user. Where did he find the insights that made him such an inspiration to other artists? Making a famous rock-star biopic must be a temptation to fill it with crowd-pleasing footage of their songs. Then link it with candid shots to show the 'real' person. Thankfully, Schnack has steered an alternative course with great integrity in his pursuit for truth. He has looked at how the formative years made the man. The result is not a pat answer underlined with some snappy lyrics. It is a convincing and inspiring portrait of a man who was not easy to know.

Twenty five hours of unreleased interviews provide a voice-over for the film. We focus on the period from childhood to when Nirvana attain recognition. These formative years, together with Cobain's own words, give us a feeling for how his music developed. More importantly, they show the pressures on his character. In almost a crucible of personal hell (in spite of the bravado in what he says), Kurt Cobain forged a telling sincerity of expression. That expression of someone who has little choice.

Cobain acknowledges many influences, including Led Zepplin, Kiss, AC/DC and the Cars, as well as more obscure bands. But his key experiment was based on mixing seemingly irreconcilable genres. "How successful do you think a band could be if they mixed really heavy Black Sabbath with the Beatles?" he asks.

Some bands had approached elements of this already. Zepplin used strident contrasting sections: gentle harmonies would alternate with heavy metal sections. Nirvana invoked not just musical contrasts but extreme disparities of mood and lyrics. Many of their songs flip in a split second from gentle, sensitive, caring sing-along-with-your-mum words - to an extreme violence of sound and imagery. "Come as you are, as a friend," takes on a horrific edge in subsequent verses. The shock value has been duplicated since (usually in a less extreme way) in the structure of music and lyrics by many rock bands, and even seems to filter down to pop groups such as Rihanna and Morningwood.

We could equally wonder if it was just part of a general music drift. But the film's insights help even an untrained ear to analyse the trends and Nirvana's role in them.

Cobain's life gave him plenty to draw on. Isolated, homeless (in the middle of winter), suffering from ADD and later manic-depression, in his dark night of the soul we can see that his love of music was his only interest. Living in a backwater of Seattle, the only possessions he valued were his artistic nature and the guitar that offered a possibility of expression.

There is nothing manufactured about the sound of Nirvana. Its heartfelt honesty perhaps helped to propel the group to wider audiences at a time when indie bands were being methodically sidelined by an avaricious industry. In reaching a wider public, Nirvana also helped to show it was still possible for an unknown band to break through the seemingly invincible wall that dictated what was acceptable.

The film's cinematography, still and moving images of the places and sorts of people that populated Cobain's early life, cleverly and almost imperceptibly adds flesh to the raw bones. The bleak Aberdeen backwater. Sleeping under bridges. Spending time in libraries to keep warm. Eventually meeting middle-class youngsters who populate an unsettlingly different world. All through this, the idea for him of simply making enough money to survive was "awesome." Cobain is maybe an extreme example of the double-edged angst felt by many young people. "I was such a nihilistic jerk half the time," he says. "I'm so f*cking sarcastic at times then at other times I'm so vulnerable and so sincere, and that's pretty much how every song comes out - it's a mixture of both of them and that's pretty much how most people my age are – they're sarcastic one minute then caring the next." Since the nihilism pervades all of the interviews except where he speaks of music, it is reasonable to believe, against his claims, that he didn't change much. "I'm p*ssed off about everything in general and so all these songs are pretty much about my battle with things that p*ss me off."

The words are inelegant and he (technically) contradicts himself on occasion. But the general sense comes through. It is one of the special gifts of cinema to be able to show the bigger picture by putting words in different settings, juxtaposing them with images, to give meanings that could otherwise be missed.

Perhaps Cobain is at his most articulate when talking about privacy and the intrusion of the paparazzi. If people believe they have a 'right' to know everything about a celebrity's life, "Then I have a right to try and change that view," he says.

Cobain was a tragic character who found happiness in so little and yet affected his artistic field greatly. Schnack's portrait will not satisfy fans that want a pop video of Nirvana songs. It doesn't feature a single one (even though it will increase subsequent enjoyment and appreciation of their music.) Neither will it satisfy the gore-hounds who want to endlessly debate whether his death was suicide or not. Yet somewhere in the misery of Cobain's life was born a spark of creative fire that was far more important. It is hard to imagine how this film could have been less commercial or more true to the quest for that flame.

A quiet, slow, but haunting meditation on the late rock hero may be an acquired taste for pre-existing fans, but ultimately ends up being a haunting character study regardless. Why this documentary really sticks out is in it's approach. Guided merely by audio clips of one of Cobain's last, and most in-depth interviews, the director shows long and lingering images of his surroundings while we listen to the troubled, quite misperceived star vent his frustrations with celebrity and recall his modest upbringings.

While slightly overlong with silent pauses in between statements, About A Boy is unique, intimate, and ultimately extremely satisfying in distilling some of the myths surrounding this icon and helping to re-humanize him again by giving us the visual counterparts to Cobain's world, without the hype.

Utilizing Michael Azerrad's 1992-1993 audio interviews with now-deceased grunge rocker Kurt Cobain as a springboard, director AJ Schnack has fashioned an impressionistic and absorbing, if thinly-derived, account of a reluctant celebrity, one who enjoyed the hungry years much more so than the sudden fame. Born in Abderdeen, Washington, Cobain recounts a carefree childhood up until his parents were divorced around the age of seven (something he found unacceptable); diagnosed with scoliosis in the eighth grade, and quickly turning to marijuana to ease both his spinal and stomach pain, Cobain freely admits he began to exhibit schizophrenic behavior and compulsive disorders. He acknowledges he was offered grants after high school to attend art school (for artwork that we never see) but instead wanted to focus on his music, which got him kicked out of the house. The streets (and friends' couches) seem a bizarre existence for an exceptionally gifted teenager, but Cobain found the independence freeing and fun ("I was being a bachelor!" he says). While Cobain is talking, Schnack's camera roams the streets of Aberdeen, nearby Montesano (where Cobain also briefly lived), Olympia, and finally Seattle, where true success found the icon at last. What appears to be the typical hard-luck road to stardom is shrugged off by Cobain, who always enjoyed the struggle more than the success. The film is a gamble--at times interesting, funny, irritating, and boring--but Kurt Cobain's words speak for themselves, and even non-fans might be intrigued by his unimaginable climb up from nowhere. **1/2 from ****

Cinematic Documentary has blossomed the last 10 years as more and more artists find reality interesting enough to make them stay away from "creating a world of their own", a.k.a. fiction. It was matter of time before the musical documentary would take the lead on this new interest in this genre of film-making -just like on TV before.

In those last years countless films have been released on anything that has to do with music -any kind of music. The most interesting of them weren't those about my (or your) favorite artists, but rather the ones that had a real cinematic approach on the way each was presenting the story. Moreover, the best of them were/are those that could be something more than just a "fairy-tale of drugs and self-destruction" or a "scientific musical analysis".

"About a Son" manages to pass this "test". Interested or not in Kurt Cobain, you cant ignore its cinematography; and that alone will be enough for you to sit and watch the film. But beyond this, the structure of the movie and director's subtle comments on Cobain's words are what make this a great documentary.

This is as close and personal you'll ever get to Kurt Cobain on film. Don't miss it.