KURT & COURTNEY
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Roxie Releasing Director: Nick Broomfield Writer: Nick Broomfield
Music hath charms to sooth the savage breast, but not all bosoms want to be placated. A recent survey about the influence of music on the nervous system showed that New Age spiritual harmonies assuage the spirit best, classical second, and not surprisingly at the bottom of the list after acid rock is grunge. Grunge musicians do not sit primly on stage in formal attire but stand and gyrate and even sometimes resort to violence against patrons and one another as they strum their electric guitars and swat their drums, committed to driving themselves and their constituents into a frenzy. Also not surprisingly, folks who are "into" this sort of discord are more likely than most to be part of the drug scene as well. It's no wonder, then, that Nick Broomfield's documentary about famed punk rocker Kurt Cobain and his less talented wife Courtney Love is chock full of interviews with people that are off-the-wall and, in fact, if you count the principal characters who appear on Broomfield's camera, you'll come up with just two down-to-earth people. One is the unaffected aunt of Mr. Cobain, the other the filmmaker himself. And not every viewer will be convinced of Broomfield's wits. The subjects are more likely than not to make frequent use of expressions like "you know," "like," and "totally" which they utter between brief periods of nodding out. The musicians tend to be awfully thin (Cobain weighed only 120 pounds) and their followers are apt to wear rings on their pierced skin.
Kurt and Courtney is not a musicography: in fact, unfortunately, Broomfield displays painfully little of the music, in one case cutting away just as the musicians at one concert were getting started kicking audience butt. Had he spent more time on the rhythms, we may have acquired more insight into the nature of the beast. But controversial rocker Courtney Love, whom even straight audiences may have seen for her vivid role in a movie about pornography king Larry Flynt, threatened to sue if Broomfield made unauthorized use of copyrighted music. Ms. Love was merely trying to stall the movie's opening, no doubt aware that all the documentarian needed to do was expunge the melodies and go on with his real agenda. Why was Love so intent on stopping the film? With good reason. Often playing like a living supermarket tabloid, "Kurt and Courtney" toys with the theory that Ms. Love ordered the murder of her husband, Kurt Cobain, who was found dead in April 1994 amid a plethora of drug equipment, ostensibly a suicide at the age of 27.
The film unfolds primarily in Seattle and Portland where Broomfield--a handsome, articulate interviewer takes us to some of the title characters' relatives, friends, and professional people who got caught up in the tawdry tale. The least sensational and yet most effective segments of the ninety-nine minute drama show Cobain in the days before he became a household word, a little kid who showed an aptitude for music early on to become later a young adult who mixed with the heroin and cocaine crowd. Interviewed after he became the leading figure of the grunge movement, he insists that the gobs of money he made from his concerts had little to do with happiness; that in fact he misses browsing in second-hand shops, anxiety-ridden about whether he can afford to buy the things he really liked but once indulging, he treated his goods like special treasures. Others confirmed later that many of the arguments he had with the woman he married, Courtney Love, were over money; Courtney favored fancy cars like the Lexus while Cobain was positively embarrassed to be seen traveling in anything but a van. Nor would Cobain be happy to be seen in the sort of mansion favored by the Mrs.
The most unusual interview is with Love's father Hank who insists that he loves his daughter (with "tough love,") has written two books about her and Cobain, and astonishingly enough suggests that his daughter indeed had her husband murdered. Tom Grant, a private detective who had been hired by Love to find Cobain when the rock singer was missing for days likewise speaks against type by suggesting even more strongly that Cobain was murdered in that there were no fingerprints on the gun, the police botched the evidence, and that a man with 1.52 mg of heroin in his system would not be able to stand up and pull the trigger of a rifle. A character who is far-out even by West Coast standards, El Duce, has a drunken talk with the interviewer insisting that Love offered him $50,000 to whack her husband but that he flat-out refused the bid. (It came out later that this Duce was paid $100 by Broomfield for the interview. Duce, who led a weird band called the Sex Slaves, was later killed by a train while he was drunk.)
Some reviewers have already criticized Broomfield for being biased, contending that he takes for granted the theory that Love ordered the murder. The movie, however, shows the charming interrogator to be fair-minded, to challenge those like the private detective and the father when they accuse Love of criminal activity. But Broomfield is no fan of the woman, whom he portrays as unstable, consumed by an insatiable desire for attention, and given to violent threats such as the one she made on the answering machine of a hostile biographer, who moved suddenly from Seattle to L.A. fearing for her life.
Strange, isn't it, that a druggie like Courtney Love is honored by the prestigious American Civil Liberties Union for her stand on free speech in the movie "The People vs. Larry Flynt" when, in fact, she was merely acting a role with no part in the writing and when many people question the use of Larry Flynt as a role model for the First Amendment.
Though "Kurt & Courtney" cries out for a deeper look at the demons in Cobain's life--the reasons for his psychosomatic stomach pains and his suicidal depression--its tabloid-like albeit fair assessment of Cobain and Love are vastly entertaining. Pulled from the Sundance Festival at the 11th hour, the movie will ironically draw fair-sized audiences are commercial screening if the crowd attending the opening in L.A. are an indication. Not Rated. Running time: 99 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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