Rating: Without context and the enduring charisma of Kurt Cobain's mythos, there's a good chance that anyone watching Montage Of Heck would hand it over to the police as concerning material. It's entirely brilliant, that much isn't up for debate; it's just as horribly difficult to experience as it is utterly compelling. Like an excruciating mouth wound you can't stop flicking your tongue at. There are incredible morsels of truth entwined in what you could already have gathered from Cobain from the stamp he left on collective consciousness. Discovering the details of his psychosis, or his wild mood swings and torturous pain adds electricity to those factoids, but it's the disarming revelations of his will to succeed and his crippling fear of humiliation that linger the longest. The most interesting way to view Montage Of Heck is as a joint art exhibit, created by and overseen by both Kurt Cobain and director Brett Morgen. Instead of sycophantically trawling Cobain's artwork and most personal materials looking for his version of the story of the artist's life, Morgen seems more interested in presenting it and inviting interpretation. He's not even entirely suggesting that you should emerge with any grand idea of what Kurt's genius was; which is what sets this apart from your usual biographical documentary. So too does the medium used, which doesn't even feel entirely like film all the time: hence the appropriateness of the title. Animation is interspersed with clippings from Cobain's journals and sketchbooks, and sit alongside archive footage (some unseen) and brand new interviews. And the level of access feels both unprecedented and entirely legitimising. The lack of politicised agenda - which would surely have been a romantic ideal, given the notoriety of the subject - is refreshing, and it leaves the way open for some stunningly artistic sequences, not so much interpreting Cobain's artwork as giving it life. And there's no attempt to offer any answers that don't come from Cobain's closest friends and family or from Cobain himself. There are some troubling things, depending on how you choose to watch Heck. If you're a fan of Cobain who dials directly into the mythology of the artist without wanting to see every raw nerve splayed out and picked apart, then it's probably not for you. This is not an exercise in hero worship as much as it is a pained examination of a labyrinthine, tortured mind, warts and all. For anyone who misses Cobain as an artist and a musician, that makes watching a morbid, challenging experience - which is pushed along rather grimly by some brilliant but haunting covers of Nirvana's most famous songs. Hearing them in a new way, no matter how familiar, and feeling the message that everyone seems to have missed when he was alive (as Krist Novoselic concedes he probably did at times) is genuinely enough to bring tears. And there's no real accusations in the film, which feels a little bit like a missed opportunity, particularly at the start. When his family and first girlfriend relate his adolescence, there is an edge of guilt to his father in particular, and few of them look comfortable. Even his mother is curiously attracted to the myth of the artist (there's a little too much My Son, The Rock God about the way she talks). There's another story there, and it's one slight disappointment that it's avoided, and it draws attention to the other things that may have been glossed over. The other notable absences are of Dave Grohl, of course, who hangs over the film ominously, and any kind of talk about musical ability or the importance of grunge as a genre. But then, perhaps that's because everyone knows all of that, and spending time raking it over again might have looked too much like sycophancy. And Grohl's absence is easily explained by Courtney Love's involvement, which is some of the most candid and enriching material (certainly the window into their life together is). Endlessly repeating Nirvana's gloried origin story would have been redundant, and so too would writing a eulogy, but this is neither of those things. It's ridiculously intimate, and intimately ridiculous; profound almost to a fault, deliciously voyeuristic too, painting a picture of what made up the man behind the myth and the magic. It's an experience, that much is sure, and it's absolutely essential viewing. Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck returns to cinemas on 7th August.
