† NillaMora †

By Kurt Loder

The late Nirvana leader is brought back alive in an illuminating new documentary.

Kurt Cobain (file)

Photo: MTV News

 

Thirteen years after he committed suicide in his Seattle home, Kurt Cobain speaks again in this strikingly impressionistic documentary. The film is a collaboration between director AJ Schnack (whose aversion to punctuation accounts for both the run-on title and his own period-free initials) and journalist and author Michael Azerrad, whose 1993 book, "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana," remains the definitive account of that great band. In the course of working on the book, Azerrad (who, I should note, is a long-time colleague) conducted some 25 hours of interviews with Kurt Cobain. These were held between December 1992 and March 1993, mostly from midnight to dawn in the house Cobain was living in at the time, in the Sand Point section…

In December 1992, Kurt Cobain and rock journalist Michael Azerrad began a series of interviews that would eventually become the beating heart of Azerrad's band biography, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. For that project, Azerrad recorded over 25 hours of the rock star's musings and reflections, but until pairing with director AJ Schnack to make Kurt Cobain About a Son, had never released the tapes' contents to the public. This film, then, playing at the Varsity for just one week, is a gift to Nirvana fans, the Kurt-curious and grunge scholars everywhere.

But these folks, though fiercely devoted, are smaller in number than you might think. Even in Seattle. And there are some among those few who, in a Kurt-free world, have gone mad with longing, have thrown themselves into the psychedelic abyss of conspiracy-theory lunacy.

The audience for Friday night's…

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article by Bill White running Thursday:

"Kurt Cobain About a Son" is remarkable, not only for its first-person oral history, but for how Wyatt Troll's cinematography captures the Puget Sound area as Cobain might have experienced it. Hearing his voice as the aerial cameras explore his hometown of Aberdeen induces a sense of intimacy that is unprecedented in movies about rock stars.

From the review by White that runs today:

"The soundtrack is rich with the music Cobain listened to, and the images reflect what he saw during his years in Aberdeen, Montesano, Olympia and Seattle. Listening to the music of Queen while watching men work in an Aberdeen lumber mill communicates an aspect of Cobain's early years that could not have been captured by conventional means. Another device, used to support Cobain's claim of being typical of his generation, is showing anonymous people engaged in the…

By Thomas Rozwadowski
trozwado@greenbaypressgazette.com

As someone who has tried to read everything written about Nirvana, one of Kurt Cobain's most admirable qualities was his public reverence for bands that helped shape his burgeoning musical legacy.

When Nirvana became the torchbearer of the grunge generation, Cobain never failed to mention his adoration for unsung artists like Half Japanese, the Vaselines, Flipper and Beat Happening. The latter group, one of the Northwest's earliest purveyors of lo-fi indie rock, never became huge because of it, but they had an especially profound influence on Cobain.

With a new generation viewing Nirvana's music through a historic lens, the soundtrack to A.J. Schnack's "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" documentary serves as an exquisitely unconventional timeline of his life in musical terms.

At the…

Documentary filmmaker AJ Schnack's online persona has been getting all the attention.

By Mark Olsen

The juggling of multiple and often conflicting responsibilities has become an integral part of the multi-tasking life. A whole new set of issues can arise when those separate duties intersect.

For AJ Schnack, the collision has come between his work as a documentary filmmaker -- his latest, "Kurt Cobain About a Son," opens today at the Nuart -- and a blog he started called All These Wonderful Things (edendale.typepad.com).

The movie is an artful, emotionally engaging portrait of the life and times of unlikely superstar Kurt Cobain, who as a member of the landmark group Nirvana was a figurehead of alternative rock before he committed suicide in 1995. The film is narrated in a sense by Cobain, with audio culminated from some 25 hours of interview tapes conducted by the journalist Michael Azerrad while working on his 1993…

Unusual Cobain documentary ‘About a Son’ looks past rumor and fame

~ By STEVE APPLEFORD ~

Photo by Charles Peterson~ Lay your hands on me: Cobain meets fame ~

urt Cobain killed himself at the height of his fame on April 5, 1994. And ever since, the life and legacy of this tortured rocker has been the subject of wild imaginings and inane conjecture. Did he really love Courtney? Was he a mumbler?

As the leader of Nirvana, Cobain was the ’90s grunge king, a rock revolutionary whose songs of raw, emotional power could be communicated equally at either full-bore electric howl or (for one night, at least) in wounded acoustic mode. For many listeners, the music was enough. Others prefer to speculate.

Ending the speculation is one mission of Kurt Cobain About a Son, an unusual documentary from…

From Edward Douglas at ComingSoon.net:

"10 out of 10

I was intrigued by the prospect of an in-depth look at the life of Cobain told in his own words from the days before forming the band to the time before his death. I was also interested in this doc, because I really liked AJ Schnack's previous music doc Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns), which was about a band I had worked with more directly, They Might Be Giants, which showed lots of interesting footage and interviews with their famous fans. Kurt Cobain About a Son is a completely different beast altogether for ways that I'm hesitant at mentioning, because it might spoil what makes this film so special and such an amazing film experience.

I'm just amazed by what Schnack has achieved with this doc, especially considering how different it is from Gigantic. Either way, this really is one of…

Adding to prizes from AFI Silverdocs and the Denver Film Festival, KURT COBAIN ABOUT A SON took the award for Best Documentary at the 2007 San Diego Film Festival.  Thanks to everyone at the festival for their hospitality and kindness this past weekend!  And congrats to our friend Annie Sundberg, who won Best Female Filmmaker for her documentary THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK.

From Steve Ramos at indieWIRE:

"Taped conversations between Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain and music journalist Michael Azerrad form the attention-grabbing center of director AJ Schnack's otherworldly documentary "Kurt Cobain About a Son." The true highlights of the film, more than Cobain's never-before-heard commentary on life, death and the price of sudden fame, are Schnack's artful technique, pinpoint editing, clever animation and beautiful collage of Pacific Northwest landscapes and everyday Seattle people."

Also at indieWIRE, an interview with director AJ Schnack.

A fallen building at the mill where Kurt Cobain’s father worked in “Kurt Cobain About a Son.”

It’s hard to know who the audience might be for the documentary oddity “Kurt Cobain About a Son,” but I bet its subject, the guy who’s still being called on to entertain us even after his death, would have hated it. 

Directed, if that’s the right word, by A J Schnack, the film weds about an hour and a half of audio interviews by the journalist Michael Azerrad with a stream of pretty visual images of places and unidentified people shot in and around where, for much of his too-short, 27-year life, Mr. Cobain lived, loved (if never enough, it seems), labored, played guitar, shot heroin and created beautiful, angry, popular music with…