Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
An intimate and moving meditation on the late musician and artist Kurt Cobain, based on more than 25 hours of previously unheard audiotaped interviews conducted with Cobain by noted music journalist Michael Azerrad for his book "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana." In the film, Kurt Cobain recounts his own life - from his childhood and adolescence to his days of musical discovery and later dealings with explosive fame - and offers often piercing insights into his life, music, and times. The conversations heard in the film have never before been made public, and they reveal a highly personal portrait of an artist much discussed but not particularly well understood.
Kurt Cobain: About a Son is a genuinely distinctive documentary that forgoes standard talking-head interviews entirely, instead pairing Cobain's previously unheard audio interviews with impressionistic visual essays of the Pacific Northwest locations central to his life. The cinematography by Lance Bangs is hauntingly atmospheric — slow, lyrical footage of Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle that functions almost like a tone poem rather than a conventional doc. Novelty is high because the form itself is singular: no archival concert footage, no celebrity testimonials, just Cobain's own voice layered over evocative landscapes, creating an intimate and melancholic portrait unlike virtually any other music documentary. The audio interviews are revelatory and personal, though 'acting' as a category is largely inapplicable — the voice performance from Cobain himself is compelling but the film has no cast in a traditional sense, scoring below average there. The narrative arc follows a loose chronological structure that is engaging but not dramatically propulsive, landing solidly above average. The ending is appropriately mournful and restrained given what the audience knows is coming, though it stops short of being truly cathartic or revelatory in its final moments.