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New documentary shows Kurt Cobain as he was

AUSTIN, Texas - When Brett Morgen was working through the drawings, journals, home videos, and sound collages that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain left behind after taking his life in 1994, the filmmaker found a note to Cobain's then-girlfriend Tracey Marander, written in the late 1980s.

Kurt Cobain with his wife, Courtney Love, circa 1992. Love approached Morgen in 2007 to make the film. (Dora Handel/Corbis)
Kurt Cobain with his wife, Courtney Love, circa 1992. Love approached Morgen in 2007 to make the film. (Dora Handel/Corbis)Read more

AUSTIN, Texas - When Brett Morgen was working through the drawings, journals, home videos, and sound collages that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain left behind after taking his life in 1994, the filmmaker found a note to Cobain's then-girlfriend Tracey Marander, written in the late 1980s.

"I'm going to work now," Cobain wrote. "When I'm gone please go through all my things and figure me out."

That was Morgen's task in 2007, when Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, approached him about making a film. Love was a fan of The Kid Stays in the Picture, the director's 2002 hit documentary about charismatic Hollywood producer Robert Evans.

I spoke to Morgen in March at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, where Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck was screening. His stringy hair was lit from behind in a window seat at the Four Seasons hotel bar.

"[Love] came to me," Morgen said. "Honestly, I think she thought I had a higher stature in the film business than I do."

The revelatory and heartbreaking Montage of Heck - named after a treasured mixtape made by Cobain while he was still living in Aberdeen, Wash., before Nirvana rocketed to fame - will have its Philadelphia premier at the Roxy Theater on Thursday. It begins a cable TV run on HBO on May 4.

Cobain left behind a "comprehensive audio-visual biography," said Morgen, whose website proudly quotes a New York Times profile that called him "the mad scientist" of documentary film. Morgen's previous music movies include the 2012 Rolling Stones saga Crossfire Hurricane. He's married to filmmaker Deborah Eisenstadt.

"I'm the same age as Kurt," said Morgen, 47. "And I've never experienced anyone of my generation who really had to create the way the most of us have to breathe. He was that prolific in varied media."

Morgen calls Nirvana's cultural significance for his generation "enormous": "Growing up in the 1980s, pop culture sucked. ... It was not a good time. And then suddenly Nirvana broke out, and we weren't watching MTV as a comedy show anymore. We would watch MTV and drink beer and laugh. And then, all of a sudden, we saw ourselves on TV, and Reagan and Bush were done, and we won the war."

Eighty-five percent of the material in Montage of Heck is previously unseen, Morgen said. Much is remarkable. There's footage of an adorable Cobain as a tow-headed preschooler, before his parents divorced when he was 9.

That breakup began a period of Cobain being shunted back and forth among family members. It left the future punk-rocker stricken with a sense of abandonment and shame that would shape his music.

There's also home-movie footage shot by Cobain and Love after 1991's Nevermind, when both were using heroin. Some of it is painfully distressing. And some of it, particularly after the birth of daughter Frances Bean - who, now 22, is credited as an executive producer - is tender and charming, including a previously unreleased recording of Cobain singing the Beatles' "And I Love Her."

Among the surprises was a box of homemade tapes, which Morgen put to imaginative use, with animation. We see the grunge icon-to-be making music at home in Olympia, Wash., while Marander is at work, or recounting losing his virginity and an early suicide attempt.

"You have to filter through the self-mythologizing," the director said. " . . . He talks about laying down on the train tracks, and I don't show him laying down on the train tracks for a reason. I didn't want to portray it as something entirely factual.

"The way Kurt experiences those feelings and emotions is real. But did he dress it up? Probably. I can only imagine he did."

Along with Love and Cobain's parents and sister, Nirvana bass player Krist Novoselic, who was in Nirvana from the beginning, is interviewed. Drummer Dave Grohl, who now leads the Foo Fighters, is not. Morgen says he was concentrating not on hitting every single Cobain signpost, but on the real story, "Kurt's interior journey through life."

 With Montage, he's "thrilled to have provided what I think is maybe a service. There are a lot of people who care about Kurt, and they're going to get more Kurt than they ever thought they were going to get."

His real audience, though, is Frances Bean Cobain. She told Rolling Stone that when she first met the director, "I was very specific about what I wanted to see, how I wanted Kurt to be represented. I told him, 'I don't want the mythology of Kurt or the romanticism.' " (She also admitted that "I don't really like Nirvana that much. . . . The grunge scene is not what I'm interested in.")

"When I screened her the film for the first time, she said, 'Thank you for giving me a couple of hours with my father that I never had,' " Morgen recalled. "And at this point in my life, the single greatest thing I've achieved as a filmmaker is giving her those two hours with her father. I don't know what's going to top that."

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