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Filter is very proud to present the exclusive first look at the trailer for About A Son the new documentary about Kurt Cobain from AJ Schnack. The movie splices together new footage with photographs to Cobain’s story using audio from over 25 hours of tape gleaned from interview sessions between Cobain and Michael Azzerad, author of Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana.

| “About A Son” | Trailer |

The soundtrack to About A Son is available from Barsuk Records and features many of the artists Cobain cites as influences, as well a score by musician and producer Steve Fisk and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Benjamin Gibbard.


About A Son Tracklisting:

01. Steve Fisk & Benjamin Gibbard - Overture
02. "never intended" [interview excerpt]
03. Arlo Guthrie - Motorcycle Song
04. The Melvins - Eye Flys
05. "punk rock" [interview excerpt]
06. Bad Brains - Banned In D.C.
07. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Up Around…

AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine recently reviewed the About A Son soundtrack:

AJ Schnack's documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son is constructed largely from interviews author/journalist Michael Azerrad conducted with the Nirvana singer/songwriter when he was writing their authorized biography, Come as You Are. About a Son is also a biography, but it relies on Cobain's own recollections, pairing it with still photos and newly shot footage of Olympia, Seattle, and Aberdeen, WA, all intended to create the perception of seeing the world through Cobain's eyes. There is no Nirvana footage in the movie and there are no Nirvana songs on the accompanying soundtrack, which instead relies heavily on songs important and influential to Kurt, along with five interview excerpts and a couple of dreamy, atmospheric instrumentals from Death Cab for…

Pitchfork weighs in on the soundtrack here and gives the record a 7.0.  The review also talks about the film itself:

In the past decade we've already seen a hackneyed conspiracy-theory documentary (Nick Broomfield's Kurt and Courtney), a thorough, sensitive biography (Charles Cross' Heavier Than Heaven), the 2002 publication of Cobain's journals and a demo-saturated three-CD Nirvana box set (2004's With the Lights Out) that felt more like an invasive, archeological excavation than a definitive overview of a band's work.

So what can AJ Schnack's new Cobain documentary, About a Son, contribute to this hagiography? Unlike the aforementioned works, it has the uncanny effect of making its subject seem like he's still alive. By setting revelatory audio interviews with Cobain-- conducted by writer Michael Azerrad for his 1993 Nirvana book, Come as You Are-- to contemporary, serene images of the cities he inhabited (Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle), the film…

Five more cities for our theatrical run this fall.  Look for even more dates to be announced in the coming weeks.  Here's the full line-up to date:

New York City
IFC Center
Opens October 3

Los Angeles
Landmark Nuart
Opens October 5

Seattle
Landmark Varsity
Opens October 12

Philadelphia
Ritz Theatre
Opens October 19

Washington DC
E Street Cinema
Opens October 26

Amherst, MA
Amherst Cinema Arts Center
Opens October 26

Bellingham, WA
Pickford Cinema
Opens October 27

Denver
Starz Film Center
Opens November 2

Nashville
The Belcourt
Opens November 2

St Louis
Landmark Tivoli
Opens November 2

Boston (Cambridge)
Landmark Kendall Square
Opens November 9

Columbia, SC
Nickelodeon Theatre
Opens November 9

San Francisco
Landmark Lumiere Theatre
Opens November 30

Berkeley, CA
Landmark Shattuck Theatres
Opens November 30

Artists who die young are either dismissed as overly hyped (Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain) or hailed as rock 'n' roll immortals (Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain). The truth, however, is always more complicated and hard to reach than we choose to make it.

Shortly before his suicide in April 1994 in his Seattle home, Cobain was slapped with the "spokesman for a generation" label, one that stuck to him long after his death. (The fact that a suicidal heroin addict was named the spokesman for Generation X tells you all you need to know about how the elder generation felt about that particular age group.) But before he was a superstar celebrity, appearing on MTV's "Headbanger's Ball" in a prom dress and filling tabloid pages with his stormy relationship with Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain was just a young…

This scene from About A Son captures the view from South Main Street looking up at the Highway 12 overpass in Montesano, Washington, a town not far from Aberdeen where Kurt Cobain spent a portion of his adolescence.  This shot, like the others that we've had on the blog, are directly from our 35mm negative and our cinematographer Wyatt Troll.

Six months before we shot the above image, I scouted in Montesano for the film and was immediately struck by the graphic quality of these structures (and the inherent quality that it was, in fact, the road out of town) and shot the image below, which served as the reference for Wyatt's image in the film.

Speaking of cinematography - and since we're on the verge of the next Toronto Film Festival - let's take a look back to 2006 and a conversation that my DP Wyatt Troll and I had about the making of About A Son.  Here's the piece, which still lives over at the Toronto Fest's most excellent Doc Blog. 

A sampling:

AJ:  (W)e knew it was going to be this new way of working.  It wasn’t a traditional documentary shoot at all, in terms of interviews or verite shooting style.  It was more structured, but yet we also had, I think, a real freedom to discover as we were going.

Wyatt:  I have to say you may be right (which, by the way, is what WC Fields said to all his fan letters, good or bad) but really some of the most exciting things are things that happened because we were…