Nirvana's Kurt Cobain needed help but didn't get it, documentary shows
Montage of Heck is an intensely personal treasure trove that doesn't provide all the answers to the reclusive frontman's suicide, but may allow fans finally to move on
Like Jim Morrison before him, Kurt Cobain exists in a dorm-room-poster afterlife, sanctified by fans, many of whom were born after his suicide in April 1994 and who flock to his recordings with the certainty that the music of Nirvana speaks directly to them. To its eternal credit, the music does.
While the rest of us get older, Cobain is forever 27 and still terribly, ruinously (and, almost certainly, clinically) depressed. Beyond that, the questions nag. Was it the drugs? Was he born sad? Was it Don and Wendy Cobain's divorce when Kurt was a boy? Was it his tumultuous marriage to Courtney Love? Was it the pressure of fame? Was it corporate rock? Was it creative despair? Was it Seattle?
Biographers and filmmakers have gone over it and over it with varying results, but Brett Morgen's rich and achingly artful new documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck - which was released last week - puts an end to those questions. It does this not by definitively answering them, but by redirecting the focus on how Nirvana's tragic frontman came into this world, how he was artistically and emotionally wired, and what kind of person he was before and after success. From this comes the only real answer: he needed help and didn't get it.
"With 20/20 hindsight, you think: 'Why didn't I see it?' or 'I should have said something'," says Nirvana's bassist, Krist Novoselic, one of the many interviewees in Montage of Heck who once more - and with the benefit of time - open up some deep hurt for this telling, which is "fully authorised".
As Novoselic notes and as Montage of Heck evinces, Cobain's struggles were "plain as day - it's all right there", spelled out in song lyrics and in Cobain's obvious discomfort with attention and praise. Cobain also "hated being humiliated", Novoselic says, recalling the singer's reaction to Nirvana's first negative review. "He was also very careful and stubborn about the way the art and the work were presented. I could be humiliated, but not Kurt. No."