At the centre of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is not a mythical hero or a deplorable villain but a man and a young boy crying out for normality only to find more dysfunction. As a toddler, the frontman of one of the most influential rock bands of all time, Nirvana, was happily playing his toy guitar. Years later, after his parent’s divorce, numerous failed suicide attempts, and the birth of a daughter whom he loved, 27-year-old Kurt Cobain took his own life.
The masterstroke of Brett Morgen’s inventive documentary is how he takes the emotion of Cobain’s already existing home videos, audio recordings, diaries, drawings, and music, and curates them into a montage of this artist’s broken soul. Certainly this is among the most artistic and rousing uses of documentary form in recent memory.
While most docs are simply driven by talking heads intercut with animation, visual motifs, and some re-enactments to break up the monotony, Montage of Heck’s prodigious intertextuality gives the film an excitement and authenticity that would have been missing from a more conventional doc.
At first glance, the film is such an explosive expression that its radical inventiveness seems unimportant, but if you’re able to sit back and examine how the film subverts the ground rules of direct cinema and cinema verité, Montage of Heck becomes a film as inventive as Cobain himself — drawing from existing influences to craft something wholly unique and unifying.
Near the beginning of the film, Kurt’s parents describe the increasing difficulty of his rebellious teenage years. His anger and embarrassment of his parent’s divorce led him to start using drugs and hanging around a rougher crowd, primarily for the access they provided to dope and booze.
This is pretty standard stuff, cutting between different interviews and even laying over a thematically relevant Nirvana track like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but this approach remains purely objective, telling us what Kurt felt without expressing his emotion for him.
Cobain narrates his own story (from an old audio-journal) describing this time in graphic detail: his escape to drugs and the events leading up to a failed suicide attempt — all with nihilistic poetry. We have exited the realm of objective documentary and entered into the mind of a tortured teenager as the world on the screen changes to hand-drawn animation with dark colours and murky images that visualize his battered memory.
In the background is a remix of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” done not with the angry, screechy vocals or blaring guitars but with gentle, melodious violins. Not only is Morgen intervening in Cobain’s world by showing the viewer where the pain in that song originates, but he also reconstructs Cobain’s world through animation. However, the authenticity really comes through the stripped down pain in Cobain’s diction amidst the images and sounds.
Morgen has melded together the abstract and the concrete, the objective and subjective, the facts and the emotion, all by uniting elements typically used in fiction (narration, animation, and non-diegetic sound of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) with the authenticity and verisimilitude that comes with documentary conventions.
In interviews, Morgen has said Cobain had essentially made this film through his artwork, journals, and home videos, but one can see the director’s light hand in every moment,meticulously editing everything into this single vision.
Every poetic outcry Cobain wrote has a hint of depression — each scream a cry, every slow whimper a hurtful memory. It’s the subjective re-interpretation of guitars to violins that gives the film its power, but it’s the truth of the artefacts that Cobain left behind that gives the film its bracing truths.
