Filter Magazine's Pat McGuire has an interview with Michael Azerrad and a review of the film in the current issue:
Kurt Cobain was a lot of things we knew about and a lot of things we didn’t. Genius, druggie, screamer, sage—you know the drill. And so often when someone in the public eye is taken from us too early, we’re force-fed hastily compiled posthumous albums, unfinished symphonies and overbearing journals (ahem) to supposedly remind us why we loved the artist while he/she was on this Earth. Sure thing, $hakur. But until director AJ Schnack’s new experimental film, Kurt Cobain About a Son, we really didn’t know what the spirit of our anti-hero Son, as they say, smelled like.
Taking audio of Kurt’s voice from 25 hours of previously unheard interviews by music journalist Michael Azerrad (at the time working on definitive biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana), About a Son features Kurt’s musings on his personal life. Included are tales of childhood delinquency, chucking rocks at cop cars and sleeping on friends’ porches, not to mention, ironically, his ruminations on the severe distaste he’d developed toward journalists. The visuals comprise, almost entirely, lingering, candid shots of the three Washington cities in which Kurt lived—Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle…and that’s about it. Crazy, huh? Not at all.
The viewer adapts to the format quickly, and is soon enraptured, waiting for Kurt’s voice to return, just as we would eagerly anticipate the star of any film. The shots are beautiful and multi-layered: a left-handed guitar stands defiantly among a forest of righties in a music store; a “Teens” placard hangs innocently in the Aberdeen library; a barge called Youth Spirit floats by through muddy water. And the soundtrack is a collection of tunes by Kurt’s influences—from Queen to the Melvins to Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”—dispersed throughout the eerily pleasant ambient score crafted by producer Steve Fisk and Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard.
Through all this, Schnack creates a wondrous, dream-like cinematic state, with Kurt’s voice serving as our guide, comic foil, tragic hero and focal point all at once. But where the film succeeds most markedly is in its ability to connect the audience to the subject. Distanced as we always thought he was, here we can listen to Kurt becoming comfortable as the film progresses. And strangely, it doesn’t feel one bit odd to see a film about Kurt Cobain that uses none of his music and doesn’t depict him visually until its final seconds. But when we finally do see him in hauntingly stark black and white courtesy of legendary Northwest music scene photographer Charles Peterson, it’s not as an icon, nor a hero, nor a martyr; quite simply, it’s as just another person. Kurt, somewhere off in his “Leonard Cohen afterworld,” is smiling.
Much more can be found here.
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