text: type Movie Current Status In Season mpaa Unrated runtime 132 minutes Limited Release Date 05/02/15 performer Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love director Brett Morgen genre Documentary, Biography, Music 
   
   We gave it an A 
   
   In the opening moments of Brett Morgen’s devastatingly intimate documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, there’s a series of Super-8 home movies narrated by the late Nirvana frontman’s mother. “I was head over heels in love with that child,” she says as the flickering image of a towhead with bright blue eyes and an even brighter smile waves at the camera. On a hissing old tape recording, she asks her toddler son who he is. And in the tiniest, helium-pitched voice, he replies, “I’m Kurt Cobain!” It just about breaks your heart. Could the live-fast-die-young god of grunge ever have been so sweet and innocent? 
   
   It’s been more than two decades since Cobain was found dead at age 27, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head—the intimations of which could be found in his lyrics and were known to his closest friends. In the immediate aftermath of his death, the myth-building began, as it tends to do with artists who leave us too soon. Since then, the narrative of Cobain’s life—on and off the stage and in and out of rehab—has become as familiar and ossified as gospel: the troubled Aberdeen, Wash., teen who started a garage band and vaulted to global superstardom, the sensitive soul swept up in a Sid-and-Nancy-like romance with Courtney Love, the battles with addiction, the overwhelming demands of fame, and the decision to check out. But as Morgen’s brilliant film (which also premieres May 4 on HBO) shows, the narrative was never quite that tidy. Normally I’m suspicious when a filmmaker gets into bed with his subject as Morgen has here. He had the cooperation of Cobain’s family, widow, and daughter. But that access merely allows the director to make Cobain’s story feel not only comprehensive and fresh but revelatory. Morgen gives us the man instead of the myth. 
   
   Montage of Heck begins at the beginning, showing us the bright, happy kid who sinks into restless depression (the “teenage angst” that later “paid off well”). He’s shuttled between his divorced parents, never quite fitting in or feeling at home. Through hauntingly animated sequences that bring the young Cobain’s scribbled journals to life, we start to sympathize with the loneliness that eventually led him to form the band that would become his surrogate family. From there, we see Nirvana’s underground success with Bleach, followed by the meteoric, multiplatinum success of Nevermind and all the adulation and attention that followed. Interviews with Love, bandmate Krist Novoselic, and Cobain’s first girlfriend flesh out the portrait and hint at the inevitability of the musician’s tragic path, including the most difficult scene to watch in the film: a home movie where Cobain seemingly nods off on drugs as Love cuts their young daughter’s hair. It’s uncomfortable. It almost feels too private. And some Nirvana fans, who like their icons unblemished, may choose to look away. But it proves that Morgen isn’t interested in hagiography. He wants to show us the real Kurt Cobain, warts and all. A ||||| Frances Bean, who is now 25, was just 20 months old when her father killed himself, far too young to know him. After spending much of her life avoiding his myth and his music, she told Rolling Stone that the movie allowed her to "know" him in an unfiltered way. Through it, she discovered that her father truly loved her. ||||| “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” Brett Morgen’s family-approved documentary about the prodigiously talented and troubled leader of Nirvana, opens with a credit for its source material. Mr. Morgen was given access to Cobain’s archives — “art, music, journals, Super 8 films and audio montages” — and his exhilarating, exhausting, two-hour-plus film, both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage, reflects years of rummaging through that trove. 
   
   “Montage of Heck” is really a series of montages, both visual (Mr. Morgen and Joe Beshenkovsky were the editors) and aural (Cameron Frankley did the sound design). Swirls of images flash by — childhood family movies, journal and notebook entries, Cobain’s drawings and paintings, scenes of life on the road, concert footage, magazine articles, the home movies of Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love — set to an intricately layered soundtrack of Nirvana songs, archival interviews and the semiconfessional audiotapes he made as part of his diverse, constant artistic output. 
   
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   You’re never unaware of this virtuosity — “Montage” is, more than anything, an editing tour de force — or of the highly constructed nature of Mr. Morgen’s narrative. The film stops short of Cobain’s suicide in 1994, which is recounted in a one-sentence title card. But a portrait is assembled of Cobain as relentlessly self-aware and self-critical, and a theory is advanced involving insecurity and shame. And Mr. Morgen — able to choose from the archives — finds abundant clues and premonitions in Cobain’s writings and uses a full bag of film tricks to make them tell the story he wants told. 
   
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   Ultimate answers about the suicide, or about the nature of Cobain’s relationship with Ms. Love, are still elusive, though. When it comes down to it, Mr. Morgen is faced with the opacity and the nondramatic, self-fulfilling nature of the drug addiction story. This is partly why the first hour, with its home-movie footage of an angelic, hyperactive Cobain as a child and its animated sequences of his adolescence, set to his own taped narration, is the best part of the film. (Though the later scenes of Cobain and Ms. Love living in comfortable, generally cheerful rock-star squalor have their own fascination.) 
   
   Mr. Morgen’s reliance on Cobain’s personal material goes along with an unusual sparseness of interview subjects for a biographical documentary — just seven, including his mother, father and sister, his bandmate Krist Novoselic and Ms. Love. (The Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl was interviewed but not included in the film.) You can speculate about how complete a picture we’re getting, given that Ms. Love’s and Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was an executive producer of the film, but that’s all you can do. 
   
   Cobain’s and Nirvana’s music is heard throughout, and there are unusual bonuses, like a shot of Cobain fiercely running through “Drain You” at a sound check or a poignant tape of him singing the Beatles’ “And I Love Her.” Oddly, we don’t really see Cobain’s development as a musician — he seems to appear fully formed, while the film concentrates on Cobain the writer, draftsman and personality. You’re not likely to mind, though, for the duration of Mr. Morgen’s seamless mystery ride.
target: – It's pretty much unanimous: Critics are in love with Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the documentary produced by Cobain's daughter, which hits theaters today before premiering on HBO next month. With interviews from his parents, Courtney Love, and more, it offers an intimate look at the star who committed suicide at 27. Here's what critics are saying: Director Brett Morgen "gives us the man instead of the myth" in a documentary that makes "Cobain's story feel not only comprehensive and fresh but revelatory," Chris Nashawaty writes at Entertainment Weekly. Some parts, including a home video of Cobain nodding off on drugs, are "uncomfortable," but "Morgen isn't interested in hagiography. He wants to show us the real Kurt Cobain, warts and all." The result is, in a word, "brilliant." "The movie creates a portrait of Cobain that’s more intimate, and more disturbing, than any that fans have witnessed before," writes Jim Farber at the New York Daily News. It "downplays commentary to stress raw evidence drawn from Cobain's deep archives." Viewers will see "a strung-out Cobain struggling to hold his infant daughter," Farber writes, and hear him speak about a high school suicide attempt. The film as a whole leaves "questions, frustrations, and a chill." "Edited from thousands of photographs, home movies, and audio clips" the "source materials alone [make] this film a must-see for any hard-core Nirvana fan," Charles R. Cross writes at the Seattle Times. The highlights come in "segments where noirish animations dramatize stories Cobain himself narrates in audio." Though the "many powerful images on screen ... begin to overwhelm the viewer," most will be left "cheering." Mike Hale describes the film as a "seamless mystery ride" that "concentrates on Cobain the writer, draftsman, and personality." Morgen "finds abundant clues and premonitions in Cobain’s writings" to suggest that "insecurity and shame" played a role in his suicide, though the truth remains elusive, Hale writes at the New York Times. His favorite part? Seeing an "angelic" Cobain as a child in the first half of the two-hour-plus film. Frances Bean Cobain recently spoke publicly about her dad.