Brett Morgan’s retelling of the life of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain is as raw and grunge-cy an experience as the music it depicts. Following the troubled musician from disaffected youth to the nineties’ most influential artist, Morgan paints an intimate portrait of the man rather than the icon, drawing on extensive home movie footage and Cobain’s own journal entries to flay the musician’s twisted psyche.
At over two hours it does run long, while missing context within the broader Seattle scene and glancing over Cobain’s death (it ends a month prior to his suicide in 1994), but as a window into tortured genius this is as honest and unvarnished a view as you could hope for.