This year marked the twentieth anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind album, which, along with Ace of Base's The Sign, totally changed my life. In the years since Kurt Cobain's body was found in his Seattle home, there has been a gigantic squid's worth of ink spilled on his life, ranging from the florid to the flaccid, including the publishing of his old notebooks, replete with lame poetry, rock band logos, and other content he most assuredly would never have wanted released. In short, any Nirvana-phile has plenty of good places to start, although the best place to not start, is the thoroughly undercooked investigative movie biopic, Kurt and Courtney.
The movie consists of such unedifying interviews with Kurt's grade school principal, who greets the two film makers in the school's hallway with a petulant 'okay, who are you, and what do you want?' Like, why would anybody ever travel to the bleak wasteland of Aberdeen Washington for any other reason except to snuffle around for half-baked theories about, get this, rumors that Courtney Love was involved in Kurt's death. That's the premise. It's worth mentioning that director Nick Broomfield's resume includes Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, which somehow escaped an Academy nod.
While the director's intentions may have been noble, the stones he uncovered yielded nothing except for more allegations, dead-ends and conjecture from witnesses who, aside from Love's deeply estranged father, couldn't be less reliable as character witnesses. Courtney's father, who hadn't communicated with, much less been with his daughter since kicking her out of the house when she was sixteen, alleges that she likely played a role in Kurt's death, since he 'knew how her mind worked,' and that she 'couldn't hide anything from him.'
The movie suffers immeasurably by the director's inability to license any Nirvana music for the soundtrack, which withers with non-entities like Kurt's earliest recordings played in his Aunt's living room, on a reel-to-reel, and various punk rock non-starters featured in place of what could have been Nirvana's best music, and a tethering reminder to viewers of Kurt's complex world-view channeled through the band's unmistakable legacy. The film makers blame Love at every step, but their sordid and confused intentions would rightfully make anybody apprehensive about participating in the parlor blame game. There's no doubt that Courtney's controlling and probably manipulative, as any heiress to Nirvana's lucrative legacy should be. Her heavily legalized spats with former band mates Grohl and Noveselik, giving her nearly complete control attest to her shrewdness. Myth-making is delicate business. Why give carte blanch to the director of Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer?
Despite Love's legal barricades, the crew does an impressive job of tracking down every oddball curio in Aberdeen, including two warmed-over former female acquaintances of Kurt's for whom life is eternally 1993, and some nutter named El Duce, who alleges he was offered fifty-thousand dollars by Love to murder Cobain, only to be struck and killed by a train weeks after the interview was conducted. His sanity seemed questionable. He fronted a hideous hard-rock group, constantly screamed and made scary faces at the camera, and lived in abject poverty in a place that gave shacks a bad name. Plus, who the fuck manages to get hit by a train?
Apparently surrendering the original wobbly premise that Courtney slain Kurt, the film makers, having been informed that their funding had been slashed, decided to follow Love to an awards dinner at an ACLU function, where she was the keynote speaker for her cinematic debut (not including porno films) in The People Vs. Larry Flynt. Nothing says 'I believe in First Amendment rights' more than defending a sordid pornographer. Somehow, unbelievably, our intrepid film crew corrals Love in the hotel lobby for an interview, and the cameraman balks at the chance to ask her anything even distantly resembling the film's entire purpose.
Perhaps sensing opportunity's last gasp, the movie ends with the director commandeering the podium, and asking the audience how Love can be so revered as a defender of rights, when she herself had threatened journalists who had dared print unsavory and unflattering articles about her misbehavior, whereupon the quixotic cameraman has a goddamned panic-attack, and botches the shot, the final dollop of bullshit upon a heap of stinky tabloid misdirection masquerading as journalism. I will never get that hour of my life back.
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