Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #32: Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015).

He was the reluctant spokesperson the MTV Generation, and now his life and work have touched Millennials no less. But who was the real Kurt Cobain? What fuelled those anthems of anguish and rage? How did they, and fame, affect him? In Cobain: Montage of Heck, documentarian Brett Morgen sets out to answer those questions about this revered but deeply troubled icon.

Now, as Courtney Love and daughter Frances were involved (Frances as an executive producer, no less) in this documentary, you might understandably expect a biased or sycophantic portrait, but thankfully it shows Kurt warts-and-all. It follows his life and career chronologically, with revealing interviews with his parents Wendy and Don, sister Kim, ex-girlfriend Tracy Marander and Courtney and Krist Novoselic (but no Dave Grohl, likely due to Love's involvement), and while Morgen clearly admires and sympathises with his subject, he also doesn't ignore or defend any of the more reckless things Kurt did. Particularly he focuses prominently on how Kurt and Courtney kept taking heroin while knowing she was pregnant, but he avoids nosiness or judgment here by emphasising how the media's treatment of them helped nothing whatsoever.

Morgen also includes several cleverly placed and realised animated sequences, and numerous Cobain family home movies (one of which, using the song All Apologies, is particularly moving), and mentions Cobain's death simply as a coda.

Disgracefully, Cobain: Montage of Heck wasn't even nominated for the 2015 Best Documentary Feature Oscar, and that may be because several of Kurt's inner circle have publicly denounced it as inaccurate. But frankly I don't care about that in this case because ultimately it was simply meant to be Morgen's version of events, and I suspect the memories of many who were involved with Nirvana would be quite hazy now anyway. I hired this with some misgivings because while I love Nirvana, I've always felt Kurt would've objected to his story being filmed, but I am so glad I did. As a coverage of his life and music it's solid, but as a condemnation of the destructiveness of our fame-obsessed culture, it's simply heartbreaking. A knockout masterpiece.