anybody seen the kurt cobain bio yet. sounds really good from what ive read and it reminds people that the pressure of the male stereotype was still very alive then and how it was not fun for anyone who didnt want to fit into it. its called montage of heck and its not about nirvana but rather a psychological insight into his mind from his own writtings, 4000 pages, and from over 200 hours of home video.
"Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Nearly a decade in the making, Brett Morgan's Montage of Heck sheds light on Kurt Cobain’s psyche, utilizing diary entries, home movies, and interviews with Cobain’s mother, father, sister, and first girlfriend, Tracy Marander. Montage of Heck is surprisingly focused on the psychology of Kurt Cobain and as such, it doesn’t offer much on the genesis of Nirvana’s music in the mainstream; rather, Cobain's story is told through intimate, graphic insights that come from the inner-workings of his own mind—including 200 hours of unreleased audio and 4000 pages of Cobain’s own writing.
The film explores the socio-political underpinnings of the American underground through the lens of Cobain’s impulsive creativity, which often reads like an indictment. Many of his writings concern the pressure to be a "manly" man in a patriarchal society to which he conscientiously objected; he makes a cartoon called "Mr. Mustache" whose protagonist suggests that to be "100% American male" is to be complicit in the degradation of women. Cobain, in later writings, reveals that Courtney Love was the first person who "taught [him] that it is ok to be a man in a man's world." He spits in the camera and plays up his own histrionics in live footage, while the diaries mirror his unraveling. It's a disturbing portrayal of Cobain, one where we see him as a conscientious objector caught in the machinery of what he considered to be facile entertainment.
Montage of Heck is also defined by disturbia, including a diary passage about how Cobain never had any friends as a teenager ("I hate everyone because they are so phony"), which leads to a discussion of how he didn't want to kill himself before knowing what it's like to get laid. He tried to have sex with a girl who his cohorts labelled "retarded"—a girl that Cobain says had only ever had sex with her cousin—and though he was too "grossed out" to go through with it, the event led to such personal trauma and social alienation that he tried unsuccessfully to kill himself.
Cobain encountered punk rock shortly thereafter, and the discovery imbues his writing with a passion that wasn’t there before. The documentary makes clear that Nirvana gave Cobain a sense of purpose and an outlet for nihilism and artistic inclination. A strange emphasis on his later domestic life dominates the tail end of the film—Courtney Love and a young Francis Bean figure prominently, Dave Grohl is conspicuously absent. Also, Cobain’s first suicide attempt in Rome is played here as an act of passion rather than the consummation of his depressive state that the rest of the film rendered with striking clarity. Montage of Heck breathes new humanity into our well-exploited collective memory of the man."