Montage of Heck Reviewed

For those who were teens when Nirvana’s Nevermind blew up, the nostalgia is high for anything related to Kurt Cobain. The raft of books and documentaries have been endlessly disappointing for most fans. Cobain’s legend obscures the fact Nirvana’s time in the spotlight covered a very small period. No stone has been left unturned… and people like Nick Broomfield, with Kurt and Courtney, threw in some stones that were never there and proceeded to turn them over, as is his style. The fact is, Broomfield’s attempt at documenting one of the elements of people’s interest in Cobain was the most engaging, not for what it showed about Cobain but as an insight into a certain side of American life. Kurt Cobain means a lot to people and maybe the legend doesn’t live up to this? We live in a world too complicated for adults to have idols.

When I first heard about Montage of Heck, I suspected it would be the same empty nostalgia romp: they’d talk to his aunt, his first live-in girlfriend and play the audio recording of him singing at age four -- because such an audio document of childhood is so rare.

Then I read this article, Raising Heck Inside The Kurt Cobain Documentary. It looked like someone was finally looking for more than nostalgia. The Cuepoint piece does a great job at selling the documentary and, in hindsight, it feels like maybe it is advertorial… sorry, 'native advertising'. It’s actually worth a read, whatever one’s opinion of the documentary; the way the narrative was conceived, as well as the story of the film’s development, is interesting nonetheless. Montage of Heck is a well-made documentary. The animations created from Cobain’s drawings are great, the story animations are reminiscent of Linklater’s Scanner Darkly and keep it interesting, as does the endless flow of journal images, photos, audio etc. There’s also a mountain of unseen footage. Seeing Cobain with a baby Frances Bean, on the nod from heroin, is unsettling… it’s the sort of undermining of a cult figure to show a real person -- a really fucked up person -- that I was expecting more of.

Unfortunately, for the most part, the documentary elevates his endless need to be creative to also elevate its value/quality. It feeds the myth of his creative genius, which I can’t help but feel turns a blind eye to the timeliness of Nirvana that wasn’t of their making. It also rehashes the notion of Cobain as hopelessly naive which frustrated me even as a teenager. The documentary runs way too long; every word he scribbled wasn’t important and showing an entire song from MTV Unplugged is unnecessary, anyone interested has already seen it. The montage of backstage, video clip and live footage throughout the film is mismatched with the periods to which the film is discussing (a shot of Cobain on the set of ‘Heart Shaped Box’ appears very early on), which would be fine if the narrative didn’t mostly follow a chronology. And the interviews are terribly disappointing. Krist Novoselic has never been particularly forthcoming when discussing Cobain, and that’s his decision. But I can’t help feel that, maybe he never gets asked the right questions. It certainly didn’t feel like it here, a point emphasized by Courtney Love’s interview where you could hear some of the questions. Given what appeared to be an original approach to the story and how it was told, is there really anything to be discovered by discussing his heroin addiction with Love. I enjoyed Montage of Heck, it’s probably as good a documentary as we’re ever going to get on Kurt Cobain. When you listen to the music that meant everything to you as a teenager, it’s as fresh as it ever was. It’s one of the truly great things about music, and why music should always remain the domain of youth. But when you try to capture a personality removed from that experience and time, well it’s never going to live up to it.