A uniquely intimate portrait of a rock idol

About a Son is one of the most natural and subtly insinuating portraits of a young artist ever seen--and heard: it's the voice we hear, without seeing the face for more than a few seconds. On the soundtrack you hear Kurt Cobain talking (to Michael Azerrad, on the phone, apparently, in preparation for Azarrad's book, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana.). These interviews, or monologues, were staged at various times late at night over a period ending a year before Cobain committed suicide. The musical background is composed of songs Cobain would have listened to, but not his band's.

Cobain is relaxed, natural, articulate. He tells the story of his life as he saw it then, a happy childhood till age eight, then the divorce of his parents, the indifference of his father (who ran a lumber mill in Aberdeen, Washington), the drunkenness of his mother. Boredom with ordinary people--but a sense that his own life was not unusual; isolation in school; friends; association with punk rock. He couch surfs after high school, moves to Olympia with girlfriend Tracy, is in a band, eventually goes to Seattle.

It's easy to feel close to Cobain for any artistic, sensitive person, to understand how an English teacher and an art teacher singled him out and appreciated him and even submitted his art work and won prizes for him though he "didn't care about stuff like that" and was not competitive.

All the while this story is being told by Kurt, the film AJ Schnack has skillfully put together fills the screen with the places where Cobain was at the times he's talking about--his father's lumber mill, houses he lived in, his high school, record stores and the library and cafes where he hung out. You would know this from the descriptions of the film. What you didn't know was how beautiful some of the images would be, how good the photography is. And there are portraits of people who may or may not have had anything to do with Cobain--we're never told--but they're handsomely done.

Though Cobain's monologue is going somewhere--he's famous now, and he's taken us through the stage of demo tapes and first hearing one of his songs played on the radio, and record companies and concerts--what the progression to fame was, what the key moments were and who the key people where isn't clear. And so finally the images aren't, in that sense, going anywhere. Because of the premise that Cobain and Nirvana aren't going to appear (except for brief glimpses) till (briefly again) at the end, we don't get to see the famous band and the iconic singer coming into being and then doing their famous songs.

The good thing is he feels like somebody you may have known years ago in the Northwest. The trouble is nothing can be learned from this film about what was extraordinary about Kurt, if anything was (is it just that he could sing more plangently than anybody of teenage angst?). In this, Kurt Cobain About a Son is like Control, the new film about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division. Both films make the person and his emotional struggles vividly real to us, but without explaining what the spark of uniqueness was--why the band and the singer are so much remembered.

What is clear is that Cobain was in a lot of pain, literal pain; but he says drugs made it go away.

The monologue is at once both the strength and the weakness of this film: it makes Kurt accessible, but only to the extent that he wants it to. Was he high as he spoke? He says it's always true that eventually drugs don't work, that they f--- you up. He says marriage and children--meaning his own (and he talks about Courtney Love) were the best motivations to stop using drugs. But did he stop? Could he? This is where he fudges or passes over the details. Michael Azarrad can get Kurt to talk alright--he really opens up about almost everything--but Azarrad can't or doesn't try to ask him any hard questions. Some say this is only for the Cobain devotee. Release was delayed by the uncommercial nature of the enterprise (it's being released by IFC and was shown at the IFC Center in New York in October 2007). But this isn't only for devotes; it's for anyone who may be interested in the personal side of a young band singer--it's a good portrait. It's just one that the devotees will find incomplete.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.