KURT & COURTNEY (Roxie) Featuring: Nick Broomfield, Courtney Love, Hank Harrison, Tom Grant. Written, Produced and Directed by Nick Broomfield. MPAA Rating: Unrated (could be R for profanity, nudity and adult themes) Running Time: 97 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
By the end of Nick Broomfield's controversy-plagued documentary KURT & COURTNEY, I think I knew as much about Broomfield himself as I knew about Kurt Cobain or Courtney Love. The film might have begun as a biographical study, exploring the tempestuous tives of Nirvana lead singer Cobain and riot grrrl-cum-actress Love both before and after their 1992 marriage, but that's not the story it ends up telling. Instead, it becomes the tale of Broomfield's ongoing battle with Love over the making of the film -- her successful efforts to persuade MTV to withdraw funding, her objection to the use of several songs, her attempts to intimidate anyone involved in the production.
No one can blame Broomfield for being infuriated at Love, particularly when her 11th-hour legal stunt forced KURT & COURTNEY out of the Sundance Film Festival lineup. It might have been easier to sympathize with him, however, if his presence in the film weren't so consistently intrusive. Like Michael Moore, Broomfield has no qualms about filming himself in the process of making his documentary film; unlike Moore, Broomfield isn't entertaining enough to warrant all the screen time. In fact, he's just plain annoying at times, interjecting commentary over virtually every musical selection (or lack thereof) and casually referring to Cobain's hometown of Aberdeen, Washington as a "redneck logging town." Even his habit of shooting from inside the car as it pulls up to various locations feels pretentious, an attempt at you-are-there urgency which conveniently ignores that automotive jaunts hardly make for compelling cinema.
Lucky for Broomfield that his subject is such a wild and provocative one. KURT & COURTNEY features as wonderfully twisted a cast of characters as any recent film has compiled: Love's estranged father Hank Harrison, whose casual aggression towards his daughter provides a frightening insight into her childhood; Love's ex-boyfriend and former Portland-area singer Rozz Rezabek, seething bitterness at the career he might have had if Courtney hadn't driven him to hate it; a one-time friend of Love and Cobain named Amy who may or may not have photos of them doing heroin together, but certainly is trying way too hard to look like Courtney. Broomfield also spends time examining rumors that Cobain's 1994 death, ruled a shotgun suicide, was actually a murder engineered by Love. This angle introduces us to El Duce, a demented, drunken punk band frontman who claims Love once offered him "50 grant to whack Kurt Cobain." Watching the kind of people with whom Kurt and Courtney surrounded themselves makes you wonder why both of them didn't end up dead long before.
Ultimately, KURT & COURTNEY doesn't seem out to convict Courtney Love of soliciting murder, debunking many of the contentions of conspiracy theorists like private detective Tom Grant. It's far more damning in its contention that Love's drive for fame and success tends to crush everything in its path, and that her history of verbal and physical assaults is just a hair's breadth removed from her obsessive need to control her public image. It would have been chilling to watch that personality connected more directly to Cobain's psychological disintegration, but the troubled soul has little more than a cameo role in the film. Instead, Courtney is primarily connected to Nick Broomfield, who finally follows Love on-stage at an ACLU benefit to chastise her hypocrisy. KURT & COURTNEY tends to drift away from its potentially fascinating subject; it's a record of celebrity turned caustic, intercut with a record of a film-maker's pique. You almost wonder why he didn't call the film KURT & COURTNEY & NICK.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 burnin' Loves: 6.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the MoviePage for details, or reply to this message with subject line "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews