#185 - Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)

"More an insight into the man than the singer, the better parts of the film work as a character study before the fame as we learn about Cobain's troubled childhood and emotional insecurities. 

The telling of the tales is done in a way that is styled beyond the talking head documentary thematic - through doodles, sketches, hand-written lyrics and animation. 

It captures an almost nightmarish quality of detachment from reality, a feeling that seems to come through as a primary motive behind much of Cobain's actions, at least from what we are told and shown. 

There is a fantastic animated segment with Cobain narrating some disturbing moments from his teen years that accumulates in an attempted suicide via train - how much is true or not is lost in an unreliable narrator, but it plays almost like a short story itself and is utterly gripping. 

The second half is mostly his relationship with Courtney Love, told mainly through home video footage. This feels more emotionally manipulative than the first half as we see the destructive aftermath of heroin addiction and ends the film on a sour note"


- 6/10