Kurt Cobain unplugged

A new documentary on Kurt Cobain takes viewers on a harrowing ride with the late Nirvana frontman.

Cobain: Montage of Heck plays out like a slow-motion car crash. An idyllic childhood transforms into tormented teenage years before his grunge band’s unlikely propulsion thanks to era-defining 1991 album Nevermind from “complete obscurity to the No. 1 band in the world” (as bassist Krist Novoselic puts it in the film) ends in drug addiction and his 1994 suicide.

“I think part of what makes the film so haunting is that there is this sense of inevitability from the first frame to the last,” writer and director Brett Morgen says from Amsterdam at the tail end of a month in Europe spruiking the doco.

“Everybody knows how the movie is going to end,” the combative interviewee continues. “It’s clear to me that Kurt’s problems existed long before he came into the public eye, long before he met Courtney (Love, his widow) and Frances (Bean Cobain, his daughter), and — to be honest — long before he formed Nirvana.”

Montage of Heck tells Cobain’s story chronologically from “the inside out”, according to Morgen, who uses interviews with the Smells Like Teen Spirit singer’s family, a former girlfriend, Love and Novoselic alongside a huge amount of previously unseen and unheard material.

In 2007, Love approached the filmmaker to make the fully authorised documentary. The forthright Hole singer was impressed by The Kid Stays in the Picture, his 2002 biopic of Hollywood producer Robert Evans, which cleverly used photographs alongside Evans’ narration. In a similar fashion, Montage of Heck animates Cobain’s artwork, writings and audio.

Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and baby Frances Bean. Picture: Getty Images

“She said ‘Everyone knew Kurt as a musician but he was so much more than that and I have all this art that he left behind that I think could be the basis or the foundation for a movie’,” Morgen explains.

Love handed over the keys to a storage facility housing more than 200 hours of unreleased audio, 4000 pages of journals, art projects and “countless” hours of home movies. Footage of their junkie love nest makes for uncomfortable viewing.

Still, it took “five years of legal wrangling” before Morgen gained the rights to the material, including Cobain’s four-track cassette recordings that give the film its title. Much of the audio had never been heard by anyone, including Love.

“I felt like I was in a very rare, privileged position,” the director says. “He was so raw, visceral, kinetic and expressive in his art, which is why I wanted to create an experience where he could tell the story of his life through his art.”

Morgen says there were big gaps in Cobain’s life story from ages 8-21 but the lack of footage was “a blessing not a curse”.

Fifty minutes of the 132-minute documentary are animated. “When you have footage for something it makes it a little less challenging and a little less creative,” he says.

In one animated homemade recording that should stir controversy, Cobain narrates the shameful way he lost his virginity, his subsequent ridicule at high school and an unsuccessful attempt at suicide.

“It was revelatory, the most important thing I discovered,” Morgen says.

“There’s something I found very chilling about it. He’s describing the most painful teenage traumas in what I’ll describe as a slightly detached tone.”

The filmmaker adds that there’s no way of knowing whether this episode actually occurred: “It’s hard to separate fact from fiction, myth from reality.”

While much of Montage of Heck details Cobain’s sometimes traumatic upbringing and later drug addiction, the film also features oodles of Nirvana’s music and incredible concert footage. One eye-popping scene shot at the apex of their Nevermind-fuelled fame shows an ocean of fans in South America going off to the band in full flight.

The letters and journal entries are as fascinating as they are depressing, revealing both the Nirvana frontman’s creative ambition and appetite for destruction.

One chastises short-lived drummer Dave Foster’s lack of commitment (“A band needs to practise ... at least five times a week if the band ever expects to accomplish anything,” Cobain’s frustrated scrawl reads), while another details his first use of heroin to “medicate” stomach pain. In the film, Love claims her husband’s fantasy was to earn $3 million from music then quit to be a junkie.

Interviews with Dave Grohl — Nirvana’s best known drummer, Foo Fighters frontman and Love’s sparring partner — happened too late to be included in the final edit of Montage of Heck, according to the director.

Morgen, who attended two Nirvana gigs, says he’s been overwhelmed by the response since the documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in February.

“I started the movie as a casual fan and I ended the movie as a hardcore fan,” he says. “It’s really a tribute to Kurt and how deeply he has touched people’s lives all over the world.”

Cobain: Montage of Heck opens in cinemas May 7.