'Montage of Heck' documentary looks back at Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain. Photo / Supplied

Presenting Kurt Cobain’s world ‘from the inside looking out’ included examining home videos, director Brett Morgen tells Dominic Corry

Much has been said about musician Kurt Cobain in the two decades since his death but the new documentary, Montage of Heck, is the first film about the Nirvana frontman to have official family support.

With full access to Cobain's journals, artwork and home-video footage, acclaimed filmmaker Brett Morgen constructs an aesthetically unique, deeply humane portrait of a cultural icon whose legacy is still being defined. There are interviews with family members, former bandmates and Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, and a variety of animated sequences, some comprising Cobain's drawings.

"Basically, Courtney Love came to me and said 'Hey there's a whole bunch of stuff, can you put it together and say something with it?'," Morgen told Living.

"She was a huge fan of The Kid Stays In The Picture and she liked that I'd worked with ephemera and photographs. This felt like an opportunity for me to tell one of the first complete Gen-X stories. Complete in that most of us from my generation are still writing our script."

Morgen's earlier hit, The Kid Stays In The Picture (2002), told the story of legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans and received wide acclaim for how it brought black-and-white photographs to vivid life with innovative editing techniques and special effects. Morgen goes even further along these lines with Montage of Heck, using Cobain's work to tell a story that is primarily visual.

Home footage of Courtney Love.

"Kurt was an incredibly prolific artist in his lifetime and he essentially left behind a complete visceral and aural autobiography of his life in his art. His experiences were all there. So in this movie we're not getting to know Kurt necessarily through eyewitness testimony nor through the words that he communicated to the media. We're getting to know him through his art and that is why the film feels as intimate as it does.

"Most documentaries look at life from the outside looking in, but it's because of all the material available to us that we were able to present Kurt's world from the inside looking out."

Supplementing the official archival material are random images and stock footage selected by Morgen.

"Nothing was selected for the movie because it was funny or scary or cute or whatever. Everything served a purpose in our broader narrative. And even in a sequence of Kurt and Courtney goofing off, there's a rich subtext to each of those moments."

The home video of Kurt and Courtney is among the most affecting in the film and helps emphasise Cobain as a husband and father as opposed to a rock star.

Brett Morgen, director of the Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck. Photo / Supplied

"I'm always looking for the universal, that thing that transcends the subject. And the universal on Montage of Heck is probably the family origin story. It's something that transcends Nirvana and transcends punk and transcends entertainment. It's very human and universal. Kurt's narrative and the search for a family and identification."

Although Cobain is the most contemporary subject Morgen has ever examined, he sees the film as representing an era of music documentaries that is almost extinct.

"This is gonna be the last period where documenting bands is analogue, because right after Kurt, everything became digital. And now we have emails instead of journals. We have digital photography instead of 35mm photography. The aesthetic of this film was meant to be analogue. It was meant to be a home-made mix tape."

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck screens in cinemas for a limited time from Thursday May 7.