Rolling Stone: "Behind the Movie That's Moving Audiences to Tears"

From a piece on Rolling Stone.com by Leslie Savage:

You’ll hear only one voice in About a Son — Cobain’s — and there’s no footage of Nirvana or even Kurt himself in the film. “It was more about bringing him into the realm of a three-dimensional human being, not the cartoon rock icon,” says Azerrad, who drew from a bank of more than twenty-five hours of previously unheard audio tape for the project, which was directed by AJ Schnack. “It’s not a look back at Kurt, it’s a look into Kurt.”

The visuals are comprised of award-winning cinematography shot on 35 mm film of the three Washington cities in which the rocker lived throughout his life: Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle. One final image of Cobain shows up at the end of the film, but Azerrad declined to reveal it (“It’s like giving away the end of Harry Potter”). There’s no Nirvana music on the soundtrack, either. Instead, the film is set to an emotional original score by Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and a collection of Cobain’s favorite artists including Queen, David Bowie, Mudhoney and Iggy Pop (the soundtrack will get a September 11 release on Barsuk).