The morning after Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters play Monday’s sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, yet another document of Grohl’s past with Nirvana will emerge. The documentary “About a Son” (Shout Factory, $19.99) arrives on DVD, telling Kurt Cobain’s story in his own words.
Directed by A.J. Schnack, the film is built around writer Michael Azerrad’s 25-hour trove of audiotaped interviews with Cobain. Recorded in late 1992 and early 1993 for “Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana,” they are the most exhaustive and candid conversations Cobain ever had with a journalist.
Schnack does his best to simply get out of the way as Cobain tells his own story. He provides images of the Pacific Northwest towns where the singer lived – Olympia, Aberdeen, Seattle – and only late in the film do we see any images of Cobain and Nirvana.
Cobain tells Azerrad, “People don’t deserve to know, really. It’s none of their business what my personal life is like now.” But he does open up about his disappointment with his father, who abandoned Cobains family, his crippling stomach pain, his drug use and his family life.
Recorded just a year before his suicide , it’s unnerving to hear him say, “I usually am enjoying myself. I hardly am depressed anymore. I never thought I’d get to that point in my life.”
And while he emphatically distances himself from all notions of “spokesman for a generation” or “slacker icon,” he does have the clarity to see why Nirvana’s songs became so important to his peers.
“I’m such a nihilistic jerk half the time,” he says. “I’m so f – – – ing sarcastic at times, and then other times I’m so vulnerable and so sincere. And that’s pretty much how every song comes out. It’s like a mixture of both of them. And that’s pretty much how most people my age are. They’re sarcastic one minute and then caring the next.”