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Film Review: Kurt Cobain About A Son

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By: Alibastard | in: Movies, Music |

Kurt Cobain About A Son

When MTV News personality and Rolling Stone writer Michael Azerrad began taping sessions with Kurt Cobain, he didn’t realize he’d have more than 25 hours of excess audio commentary; a reality that would absolutely fascinate throngs of people curious about the late rock legend once he departed planet Earth. Azerrad was taping the sessions for what would be his 1993 bestseller, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. And though he came out of the whole affair with a best seller, a dual decade follow-up on Indie music, and later a Reprise Records contract with his band The Leevees, these as-of-yet unreleased recordings collected dust for nearly a decade in Azerrad’s closet, without exposure.

When documentary filmmaker AJ Schnack discovered this detail almost ten years later, he found the information so compelling, and the portrayal within them so sobering, especially concerning such a controversial icon, Schnack decided to make a feature length film out of it.
Coming off of his mildly successful portrait of double-John experimental powerhouse They Might Be Giants, Schnack painstakingly sifted through Cobain’s commentary, creating a rock and roll tone poem dedicated to “finding a version of Kurt Cobain outside all the conspiracy theories.”

Just as music videos are one of those filmic rarities where sound dictates image, so is Schnack’s Kurt Cobain About a Son. All in all the hour and a half juxtaposition of raw audio and loosely-documentary footage creates a feeling of harmony between the journalistic and the poetic. The deliberate placement of Cobain’s memories of childhood, music and fame are starkly supported by pertinent travel shots, quotidian close-ups and the occasional Rotoscope animation rock out (most playfully with UFO’s scanning the Washington horizon for aliens in jittery animation.)

Nirvana -About a Girl

Rather than acquiesce to distracting dramatizations, Schnack chooses wiser waters with his meditative and metaphorical collage of images – most of which serve to humanize, or at least re-imagine this colossal figure within the lands of every day uniqueness. From Aberdeen to Seattle and elsewhere we are given the feeling of a narrative within a nonetheless very experimental form. The effect actually helps us enter Cobain’s world more thoroughly, a fact that is often corrupted by the discrepancies between actors and the personalities they are purport to play when shoddy dramatization is indulged.

And though entirely uncalled for considering the way the project started, it is also a refreshing break from the now over-rehearsed Oscar genre of the bio-pic (Todd Haynes’ latest on Bob Dylan a wonderful component, and Gus Van Sant’s version actually about Cobain similarly wise in its allegiance to silence and mystery…).
What happens is a calmly persuasive window into a ever elusive figure, and into the most appealing, intelligent, but nonetheless tortured avenues of his ever compelling mind.

About a son is currently showing at the IFC Theater in New York and beyond. For more information: http://www.kurtcobainaboutason.com/.


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Posted on October 21, 2007

Comments

One Response to “Film Review: Kurt Cobain About A Son”

  1. Charbarred on October 21st, 2007 10:30 am

    I can’t wait to see this. Anyone knows if there are any plans for a wider release?


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