Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Making the film festival circuit since the 2006 Toronto Film Festival and the art house circuit since late last year is this insightful and sometimes chilling profile of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain. It's almost impossible for me to believe that we're coming up on the 14th anniversary of Cobain's suicide, but as I watched this curious documentary, I was reminded of the many reasons I found the man such a fascinating and frustrating creature. Without the rights (or at least to money to acquire the rights) to any Nirvana songs and almost no images of Cobain in the film other than a few intense black-and-white shots of Nirvana in concert, director AJ Schnack (who made the fantastic They Might Be Giants' doc GIGANTIC: A TALE OF TWO JOHNS) has compiled a wholly different kind of music biopic. More like an impressionistic film about Cobain's world, ABOUT A SON allows Cobain to narrate his own story by compiling excerpts from more than 25 hours of audio interviews he did with music writer Michael Azerrad, who wrote the book “Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana” (which features interviews with all three band members).
You could spend days psychoanalyzing Cobain's often moody and temperamental exchanges with Azerrad, but it's clear he probably felt more free and open talking to this man above all other journalists. People have tended to focus on the more than one occasion that Cobain makes reference to "blowing his brains out," but there are far more tragic passages in this film, especially from later in his career when the press decided to make him and wife Courtney Love a target of ridicule and misinformation. The bombardment clearly made him understandably paranoid. Visually, Schnack chooses to show images of modern Seattle and surrounding Washington towns where Cobain lived and grew up in an effort to piece together an atmosphere of the singer's history rather than simply give a series of photos or video images of Cobain the child or budding young musician. It's an unusual way to make a film like this, especially since you don't even see Cobain's face in the film until about an hour in.
Music documentaries are probably my favorite kind of docs, and I see so many conventional ones in a given year that it gets a bit tiresome. ABOUT A SON takes a bit of getting used to, but any shortcomings the movie may have seem overshadowed by so many uninterrupted minutes of listening to Cobain's articulate, confused, pained, funny, angry and uncensored voice. The film quickly made me realize how much I'd heard "about" him without actually hearing "from" him. This is a rare and essential film for any Nirvana and/or Cobain admirer.
Capone
