Cartoon or no cartoon, it’s hard to believe the story at face value. “To me, that is the most interesting and revealing piece of media he ever recorded,” Morgen told the New York Times in an article for which he also requested to be interviewed while pedaling at SoulCycle. One of those cartoons is paired with a long voice-over by Kurt, lifted from a story he tells on one of his tapes, a first-person account of losing his virginity at seventeen to a “quiet and illiterate” and “very fat” girl and being so humiliated after he was found out that he got wasted and walked down to the train tracks, waiting to be killed. (The film could certainly do with far less magazine covers, tabloid stories, and Kurt Loder–on– MTV News clips.) They’re occasionally jarring, but also an occasionally weird relief from the overload of media images the director too heavily leans on elsewhere. Throughout the movie are cartoons-dark, moody, stylized animations illustrating some of the cassette material: Kurt getting kicked out of his relatives’ houses, bored Kurt drawing and four-tracking those cassette recordings at home while his girlfriend Tracy goes to work. They say they never asked Morgen for a single edit. Frances (an executive producer of the film) and Courtney didn’t protest its inclusion. Even more unsettling and weird is the moment that follows: Courtney in a pretty, prim Peter Pan collar dress, rocking baby Frances as she sings “Amazing Grace,” while Kurt chimes in deliberately off-key. And then comes a scene when Kurt is holding the baby as Courtney gives Frances her first haircut, nodding out and denying that it’s because he’s high. “That punch-drunk love thing.” When Frances Bean is born, there are more of those videos, playful and loving. “We were best friends,” Courtney said after the movie. And then cut back to Kurt himself, hair cut in a mullet, jumping out of an empty warehouse, fooling around with a photocopier in the middle of a junkyard.Ībout an hour into the film, when Courtney first appears, the band’s cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now” cues a montage of sweet, intimate, funny videos of the two of them at home together, some of them shot by Love’s Hole bandmate Eric Erlandson. He locked the babysitter out.) Here are scenes of the kids in Kurt’s favorite film, Over the Edge, taking over their school, smashing windows and cars. (He was so hyper, his mother Wendy says, he took all the light bulbs out of the lights. Here is little-kid Kurt tearing down the driveways and alleys with his cape flying behind him, with his Batman mask. Here is happy baby Kurt unwrapping presents, wearing a tiny chartreuse cardigan not unlike the chartreuse mohair cardigan he will wear one day on MTV Unplugged, blowing out the birthday candles on a succession of cakes, a succession of plaid couches. Here is pretend-frail Kurt Cobain in a big shaggy Muppet-esque blond wig, being pushed out in a wheelchair at Reading Festival before fake-collapsing onstage and then jumping up and launching into an electric, blistering rendition of “Breed.” And then here is Aberdeen, Washington, the town where Kurt was born, in its postwar years with its fishing boats and tugs plodding along and its snowy downtown stores the lawn ornaments and the wood-paneled living rooms and men with mustaches and women with upswept hairdos. What Montage of Heck does is not so much say anything else about Kurt Cobain, but rather show it: where he was coming from, the imaginative and real-life terrain of his early years. “I thought, What else is there to say about Kurt?” “I’m as cynical as the rest of you,” said director Brett Morgen onstage just before the New York City premiere of his documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, at Tribeca Film FestivalSunday night. “He's larger than life and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians,” Frances Bean Cobain, who was just two when her father committed suicide, told Rolling Stone recently.
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