Seeing happy kiddo Cobain strumming away at his first toy guitar is the earliest of many jarring images Morgen serves up. because the citizens of Aberdeen, Washington circa 1967 dressed quite a bit like the characters from Mad Men circa 1963. Every component is fascinating in its own way, starting with the Super 8 footage from Cobain’s childhood apparently the rest of the country really is years behind New York and L.A. The film stitches together home movies from throughout his life, new interviews with his friends and family, behind-the-scenes looks at iconic Nirvana moments like MTV Unplugged and the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Heart Shaped Box” videos, consistently thrilling concert footage, awkward TV interviews, animated audio recordings of Cobain, and page after page from his notebooks, also animated. Montage Of Heck is named after a sound collage mixtape Cobain made in 1986, and it’s constructed similarly. Montage Of Heck is the definitive portrait of Cobain, and it will rattle you as much as Cobain rattled the world. But we’ve never had such a shockingly direct view into his world as the one director Brett Morgen pieced together from Cobain’s own archives with the help of Frances Bean. Thanks to a quarter-century of intense media scrutiny, we already know a lot about Cobain’s private story too: his troubled childhood, his debilitating stomach problems, his self-medication with heroin, his fear and rejection of the worldwide media spotlight, his (um) unconventional family life with wife Courtney Love and their daughter Frances Bean Cobain, and his suicide by gunshot at age 27. We don’t need a movie to tell us the story of Nirvana’s rise from obscure Washington indie-rock kids to reluctant rock ‘n’ roll saviors who changed the music industry forever that story has been told over and over again, and its facts are readily available at your public library. Even the band’s incalculable impact on modern music and pop culture only comes up in regard to its impact on Cobain. Dave Grohl was not interviewed, and his entry into the band is not addressed he’s just there all of a sudden as the archival footage shifts into the Nevermind era. While that's interesting for a while, at a certain point - and it arrives rather quickly - the fascination curdles and it's hard not to feel unclean, as if you're snooping through your beloved brother's desk.Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck is a movie about the frontman of Nirvana, but it isn’t about Nirvana. Certainly, there's some historical merit in exploring early drafts, demos, and outtakes from an important figure, but apart from a handful of demos ("Clean Up Before She Comes," "Sappy," "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle"), Montage of Heck largely doesn't consist of early drafts it consists of scrawls waiting to be turned into a first draft. Based on a few, including the opening "The Yodel Song" (inexplicably featured in a "clean" version on the single-disc and "explicit" in the double-disc), it's likely he never considered the tape again after he pressed the stop button. Cobain made these tapes with no expectation they'd ever be heard. Purportedly an unflinching, "intimate" - upon its release in November 2015, no writing about the record, whether it arrived in the form of a review or feature, lacked that word - portrait of the young artist at work, Montage of Heck is cobbled together from home recordings, some previously leaked on Nirvana bootlegs in the '90s (mainly the Outcesticide series), that come tantalizing close to taking the form of a rough demo but are amorphous enough to be called "free form" or "experimental." Uncharitably, they could also be called "dicking around." This isn't a criticism as much as it is a description. The bigger question is whether Montage of Heck needs to exist at all. No other records are credited to Kurt Cobain, and this album, in either its single- or double-disc edition, wouldn't exist if Morgan hadn't stumbled upon a cache of homemade cassettes when researching his film. Simultaneously billed as the first Kurt Cobain solo album and the soundtrack to Brett Morgan's 2015 documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, this mangled beast of a record is indeed both.
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