HBO has released a trailer for "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck." The documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Brett Morgen is the first fully authorized portrait of Cobain and provides a probing look into the notoriously reserved Nirvana frontman.
"Montage of Heck" traces its title to a musical collage made by Cobain, which combined snippets of conversations, noise, songs off the radio and demos of original unreleased music. Like the film, which debuted to critical acclaim at the Sundance Festival in January, the 2.5-minute trailer takes on the multimedia format of Cobain's mixed tapes. It presents, in a rather jarring way, bits and pieces of his life taken from more than 200 hours of unreleased music and audio, 4,000 pages of writing and a huge trove of Cobain's artistic projects.
The trailer begins with a 2-year-old Cobain, bright but shy, as he blows out the candle on his birthday cake. It progresses into teenage years filled with angst and rebellion, before he would become The Kurt Cobain — grunge legend.
The trailer features interviews with widow Courtney Love and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and includes animations re-enacting portions of Cobain's life. It ends with touching home video clips showing Cobain as a loving father to his daughter Frances Bean, who was an executive producer of the film.
Plenty of material has been published about the life of Kurt Cobain, but "Montage of Heck" is the first and possibly only documentary made with the cooperation of the Cobain family. In a press release to Hollywood Reporter, Morgen says he was given access to the entire Cobain archives, including journals, songbooks, artwork, photography, and never-before-seen home movies. He started working on the film eight years ago.
Morgen also announced via Twitter that the film's soundtrack will include a "mind-blowing 12-minute acoustic Cobain unheard track" and that the film's score is "all unreleased Cobain music."
"They don't have titles. Before people saw the movie, there were these weird press releases focusing on the unreleased music. And it's like, it's a movie, we're not going to stop it and play a song for four minutes," Morgen told Rolling Stones in January. "But nobody in Kurt's life — not his management, wife, bandmates — had ever heard his Beatles thing [a snippet of 'And I Love Her'] I found in a random tape. It's a Paul [McCartney] song. How's that for shattering the myth?"
"Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck" will debut on HBO on May 4.
