Archive for January, 2010

Kurt Cobain About A Son is an intimate and moving meditation on the late musician and artist Kurt Cobain told entirely in his own voice – without celebrity sound bytes, news clips, sensational tabloid angles or attempts to mimic a grunge aesthetic. Instead, filmmaker AJ Schnack has created something closer to an autobiography of Cobain – a profound first hand account of Cobain’s own successes and failures, thoughts and experiences, allowing the audience unprecedented intimacy with a legendary figure in popular culture – set against the wildly divergent Pacific Northwest locations that loomed so large in Cobain’s life. Based on more than 25 hours of never-before-heard audiotaped interviews conducted by noted music journalist Michael Azerrad for his book “Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana,” the film offers audiences a compelling re-introduction to one of the most interesting and important cultural figures of the late 20th century. The conversations are informal, humorous, angry and candid. Here, Kurt Cobain recounts his own life – from his childhood and adolescence to his days of musical discovery and later dealings with explosive fame -and offers often piercing insights into his life, music, and times. The conversations heard in the film have never before been made public and they reveal a highly personal portrait of an artist much discussed but not particularly well understood. Shot entirely on 35mm film, Schnack brings Cobain’s Northwest to life in vivid detail: the logging industry where Cobain’s father worked, the small bars where local bands played their first shows, the endlessly overcast sky. These images, nearly all of which were filmed in locations that were key to Cobain’s life – his home, apartment, school, record label, etc. – are set to an evocative original score by noted Northwest musician and producer Steve Fisk, who produced Nirvana’s Blew EP, and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, as well as the music of more than 20 artists who influenced or touched Cobain during his life. These elements – his own words, places that he say and the music that he listened to – come together to create an extraordinary look at a man who went from impoverished indie rocker to world famous iconic figure in less than a year. Through Cobain’s recounting, we see a portrait of a specific moment in American history, of a generation of individuals who grew up in the midst of the wrenching societal and cultural upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s. While Cobain never embraced the label of generational spokesperson, the film makes clear that he was a thoughtful and introspective figure, and that these societal and cultural changes had a huge and profound influence on his life and art.