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Watching a Nick Broomfield documentary (
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer,
Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam) makes one not just want to shower, but to scrub oneself raw like Meryl Streep did in
Silkwood. Going where even the tabloids fear to tread, the controversial
Kurt & Courtney could also be called
Courtney and Me. Investigating the apparent suicide of grunge icon Cobain, Broomfield runs into a formidable obstacle, namely Cobain's widow, Courtney Love. She blocked permission for him to use any of Cobain's music and ultimately got the film yanked from the Sundance Film Festival. Can't really blame her, as Broomfield follows the lead of a motley crew of conspiracy theorists, grudge-carrying former boyfriends, and estranged parents who suggest that Cobain was actually murdered at Love's behest. For those who watched bemused as Love reinvented herself as a Hollywood glamour girl, this is luridly entertaining stuff--albeit suspect. How much stock to put in S&M rocker El Duce (where does Bloomfield find these people?), who claims to have been offered money by Love to kill Cobain, and then offers to tell more if Broomfield will buy him a beer? Broomfield paints a much more sympathetic portrait of Cobain. In the film's most touching moment, an aunt plays a tape of a 2-year-old Cobain singing. "He's a prettly loud little guy," she says. These scenes will be nirvana for Cobain fans.
--Donald Liebenson
From The New Yorker
Nick Broomfield's chilling documentary, set in the netherworlds of Seattle and other places in the Pacific Northwest, in which we get to meet some drug-addled or merely bizarre folk who believe that Courtney Love, the raucous post-feminist icon, may have killed her husband, Kurt Cobain. The anti-Courtney revelations are interesting but inconclusive: Rozz Rezabeck, a former rocker and boyfriend of Courtney's, is by far the most amusing figure; Hank Harrison, Love's father, who reveals that he bought pit bulls to discipline his adolescent daughter, is by far the most frightening. The true circumstances of Cobain's death remain cloudy, but one comes away from the film unnerved by the distance travelled: we begin in a sleepy Washington town, with a little blond boy who likes to sing Beatles songs, and end up lost in a haze of heroin. -Daphne Merkin
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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