At times it feels like gate-crashing into the lives of an unknown family and peering into the laundry basket. There are snapshots of Cobain growing up, coming to terms with a burgeoning small-town isolation, playing with his daughter, and otherwise messing around with home-recording equipment. Montage of Heck (titled after one of Cobain’s early, home-produced mixtapes) often feels uncomfortably intimate. Montage of Heck, on the other hand, is a documentary that goes to great lengths to dispel its subject’s public persona it’s a human, tangible approach to a man otherwise defined by his myth. As I noted last month, 20,000 Days is a documentary that embraces singer Nick Cave’s public persona: it is an abstract tribute to Cave’s storytelling abilities, and the ways in which they have helped him shape new selves in the limelight. In many ways, they are the perfect counterpoint to each other.
There’s something serendipitous about my decision to watch Cobain: Montage of Heck and Nick Cave’s 20,000 Days on Earth so close together. By delving into the Cobain family’s personal archives, it tries to paint a clearer picture of the man behind the posters. As such, it largely avoids public discourse.
A grounded, archival study, the majority of the documentary is told through old Super 8 and home video footage in addition to animated renditions of his personal writings. His musical successes have seen him labelled as a counter-culture icon, and the circumstances of his tragic suicide in 1994 have elevated him to the status of the ‘voice of a generation’ without peer.Ĭobain: Montage of Heck, a HBO documentary released in 2015 and supported by Cobain’s immediate family, tries to look beneath the ‘voice of a generation’ hyperbole. Like most of the celebrities branded with the dubious honours of the ’ 27 Club’, Cobain’s life has become the stuff of legend his tenure as the front man of grunge pioneers Nirvana gradually enshrined as a cultural touchstone. Year by year, his hagiography becomes inescapable.
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His songs are played over the credits of TV shows, his images tour art galleries, and his words are regularly drawn in serif font and placed over postcard images next to music store checkouts. Even though he died twenty-two years ago, Kurt Cobain’s is a name you’d be hard-pressed to forget.Īfter more than two decades spent adorning sepia-tinted posters in college bedrooms, the late singer-songwriter is arguably more famous now than ever.
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