Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)

Brett Morgen's Cobain: Montage of Heck arrives with the full cooperation of the family, which in documentary terms is both a passport and a leash. The director was handed the personal archive, the journals, the four-track collages, the camcorder tapes, and he assembles them into something closer to a mood than a biography. Animation interrupts the footage. Cobain's own drawings crawl across the screen. The result is intimate and occasionally formless, which is presumably the point.

The talking heads are the people who knew him: Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl, Courtney Love, Frances Bean Cobain. They sit and speak about a husband, a father, a friend, a difficult man. None of them is positioned as a spokesperson for a cause, and the film never converts their testimony into a lesson about how we ought to live. Cobain's depression and heroin use are documented in unsparing detail, but the film does not reach for the vocabulary of contemporary wellness or identity politics. It simply watches a person come apart.

Some participants later objected that the film repeats stories Cobain told about himself, stories that may never have happened. That is an argument about veracity, not an attempt to rewrite history in the service of an agenda. The picture ends on a black screen and a single line of text, and then it stops. There is no closing sermon, no appeal to the audience's conscience, no instruction manual. Morgen has made a portrait of a man and left the moral arithmetic to whoever is watching. The classification here is straightforward, and the ledger comes up empty.