From Joan Anderman at the Boston Globe:
In AJ Schnack's new movie about Kurt Cobain, we don't see Kurt Cobain. There's no explosive concert footage of Nirvana, no critics debating rock history, or old friends remembering when. There's only Cobain's voice, disembodied and hovering like a ghost over an impressionistic montage of logging trucks and teenagers in Aberdeen, Wash., the musician's hometown, seedy bars and filthy apartments in Olympia, Nirvana's birthplace, and the gray skies and bright lights of Seattle, where Cobain went to become a rock star. Not nearly as reluctant a rock star, we learn, as the Cobain mythology would lead us to believe.
"We learn" is the operative term here. "Kurt Cobain About a Son" is a lovely piece of filmmaking, a gripping, minimalist marriage of sound and image. But Schnack's real stroke of genius was leaving out nearly everything you expect to get in a rockumentary about a tragic hero. Cobain's life and death, by his own hand, in 1994, have been probed and analyzed in so many ways by so many observers it's a revelation to simply listen to the man talk.
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