‘I just wanted to f – – – ing blow my brains out,” Kurt Cobain says of the nightmare caused by chronic stomach pain. It’s spooky hearing the grunge-rock god saying this from beyond the grave because, of course, that’s precisely what he ended up doing in April 1994.
The quote comes from 25 hours of early-1990s interviews with the Nirvana frontman by music journalist Michael Azerrad. In the unconventional documentary “Kurt Cobain About a Son,” directed by A.J. Schnack, Cobain’s words are accompanied by meditative, newly shot visuals of Washington state, where Cobain lived and died.
Cobain talks frankly about his childhood (“I was totally into music”), his parents, the first time he saw wife-to-be Courtney Love (“She seemed like a magnet for exciting things”), the difficulty of dealing with success and the fact that he disliked dogs because “they’re too willing to please.”
In a surreal moment, we hear Love interrupting an interview to ask her husband for a favor.
Be advised that this is no ordinary music doc. There are no talking heads and no performance footage of Nirvana. In fact, there’s no Nirvana music at all. Instead, Schnack gives us other artists’ music that had an effect on the troubled rocker.
There’s definitely an anti-doc vibe going on here, which is fitting for a man who refused to conform during a short but productive life.
Running time: 97 minutes. Not rated (mature subject matter). At the IFC Center, Sixth Avenue and Third Street.