Kurt Cobain: About a Son (2006)

Directed by: AJ Schnack | 96 minutes | documentary | With: Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain, for about fifteen years he has been the icon for the depressed alternative teenager. That status as an articulate ‘teenage fear’ was gilded with his suicide in 1994. The person transcends the music and the icon transcends the person. It almost feels like he ‘had to’ die, as a sacrifice, so much have we made him a symbol. This ‘junkie with talent’ therefore resembled the Jesus of the paintings and statues more than the reconstructed ‘historical’ Jesus. Kurt Cobain has become a successful product, whose sad angelic image can be found on T-shirts and posters in tourist shops from Paris to Prague.

The documentary ‘Kurt Cobain: About a Son’ is revolutionary in that it gives Kurt Cobain a real voice, precisely because we don’t get to see him. His voice, on the other hand, is constantly present, you cannot avoid it, all the more so because in this documentary the sound is the primary story and the images the illustrative background. The images sometimes coincide directly with what Kurt is telling (woodworking in Aberdeen, his birthplace; the bohemian scene in Olympia; school scenes, scenes in a library; Seattle), but often they don’t. We mainly see landscapes and images of roads and cities, few people and the people we see are ‘unknowns’, Dave, Chris and Courtney can only be seen in photos.

It takes some getting used to, a long, intimate interview where you don’t see the interviewee, especially when that interviewee is so famous. You can’t cling to the music either: there is no Nirvana to be heard, only music from bands and artists who inspired Cobain. As for the content, much of the information Kurt provides will already be known to those in possession of the book Nirvana: Come as You Are. Not coincidentally: the author of this book, Michael Azerrad is the interviewer you hear in the documentary. Azerrad had several interviews with Cobain from December 1992 to March 1993. Cobain reveals a lot in this. His entire life is reviewed: his happy childhood before his parents’ divorce, his great artistic talent and probably equally great physical pain (which he fought with heroin), the feeling and need to be different and yet be accepted through his music, his marriage to Courtney, the birth of Frances and his annoyance at gossip journalism. This is all reflected in the book ‘Nirvana: Come as You Are’, but surprisingly the word ‘Nirvana’ is very rarely used in the documentary. In the book you get a picture of the band – albeit mainly of Kurt – filtered through Azerrad. The book comes across objectively, while the documentary lets one person speak. It is true that the fragments have been selected, but what is said by Kurt is undistorted, this is clearly his view of the events. Slowly the icon has to make way for the person. As a viewer you know that the man you hear speak is long dead and that his death had and has great significance. For an hour and a half you hear him but you don’t see him. This feels like a loss, you get the need to see him again, knowing that he cannot be retrieved. When you’re dead, people can transform you into an abstraction of what you really were. Schnack has tried with Azerrad’s sound material to make the image we have of Kurt a little less abstract. This makes the documentary not only recommended for the fans, but for everyone who has a certain image of the person Cobain.