Photo courtesy of HBO Documentary Films
Director Brett Morgen’s intimate Kurt Cobain documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck premiered to the public on HBO last month, weaving never-before-seen audio, drawings, and home movies from the Nirvana leader’s personal archives into a stunning autobiography of a troubled youth turned rock-star-gone-too-soon. Montage was well received by critics and fans, but in a just published discussion with sometime Cobain biographer Michael Azerrad’s The Talkhouse, Melvins singer-guitarist Buzz Osbourne, a friend and influence on Kurt, offers a withering rebuttal. “First off, people need to understand that 90% of Montage of Heck is bullshit,” Osbourne says. “That’s the one thing no one gets about Cobain—he was a master of jerking your chain.”
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Buzzo proceeds to question the truthfulness of a few of the flick’s key scenes. Of a gutting animated sequence where Cobain recounts a story about attempting sex with a mentally disabled classmate and attempting suicide on nearby train tracks after the ridicule that followed: “In that small-town shit-hole, exciting news of that nature would have been common knowledge before the sun set. It never happened.” Of Kurt’s legendary stomach problems: “He made it up for sympathy and so he could use it as an excuse to stay loaded. Of course he was vomiting—that’s what people on heroin do, they vomit.” Of Cobain’s widow Courtney Love: “When Courtney speaks, the truth is certainly there, but God only knows where it begins and ends.”
Osbourne’s problem with Montage of Heck is that in pulling large portions of its narrative from Kurt and Courtney themselves with little in the way of a counterpoint, it fails to account for whether they’re credible witnesses. If Kurt’s a noted jokester with a well documented drug habit, telling his story in his own words might not get you the definitive picture of who he was. For a film many have touted as the final word on the life of the Nirvana frontman, that’s a notable asterisk.
