"Mr. Schnack resolved to make a film from Cobain's solitary voice, and to leave the rest of him out of it: The title character does not appear at all in the film until the final few moments. It's a clever way to keep the man and the myth distinct. And it's not just him. There are no historians or bandmates in "About a Son," no groupies, ex-girlfriends, rock critics, uncles, high-school teachers, or cleaning ladies to tell us what being Kurt Cobain looked, sounded, or felt like.
Instead, Mr. Schnack took his cameras to Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle — where Cobain was raised, cultured, and knighted, respectively — and took long, scenic shots of the places where Cobain lived his life: his father's old logging yard, his elementary school, the benches he slept on, the clubs he played in, as well as beautifully rendered views of the dewy greens and rusty browns that color the stillness of the working-class Pacific Northwest. As Cobain's disembodied voice narrates his route to 1993, from a broken home where he was an outsider and didn't get enough attention, to the peaks of celebrity where he got way too much, one gets more of a sense of what it looked like from inside Kurt Cobain. Mr. Schnack's spare and hypnotic series of tableaus, which does more to marry images with words than any documentary you've seen in a while, molds a shared experience with the subject rather than an examination of him.
The experience is as painful as it is invaluable for understanding a strangely American life at the close of the 20th century. Cobain's 26-year-old voice in "About a Son" is wearied, from the chronic back and stomach ailments that drove him to self-medicate, to the unremitting media scrutiny and fan kowtowing that left him unsure, as a man of teetering self-esteem, why he should hold any of them in high regard. He undoubtedly loved music, but what he seemed to strive for was a maddeningly elusive plateau of comfort, not a transcendent artistic platform. He'd sell his music to any sucker willing to buy it and fought for more of the proceeds that Nirvana generated because he was responsible for most of the output. As Mr. Azerrad prompts him to consider his life, Cobain sounds like a man trying to think up reasons not to kill himself.
Appropriately, there are no Nirvana songs in the film; rather, Mr. Schnack has populated the background with the bands that Cobain absorbed through the years and that shaped the artist he'd become — Bad Brains, the Melvins, Scratch Acid, the Vaselines, and others. The growth of his own band — the part people remember — is left to the margins, and discussed only as it pertains to the growth of a fiercely intelligent and conflicted man."
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