Kurt Cobain About A Son

About A Son is a an intimate and moving meditation on the late musician and artist Kurt Cobain told entirely in his own voice - without celebrity sound bytes, news clips, sensational tabloid angles or attempts to

mimic a grunge aesthetic.

Instead, filmmaker AJ Schnack has created something closer to an autobiography of Cobain - a profound first hand account of Cobain’s own successes and failures, thoughts and experiences, allowing the audience unprecedented intimacy with a legendary figure in popular culture - set against the wildly divergent Pacific Northwest locations that loomed so large in Cobain’s life.

Based on more than 25 hours of never-before-heard audiotaped interviews conducted by noted journalist Michael Azerrad for his book “Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana,” the film offers audiences a compelling reintroduction to one of the most interesting and important cultural figures of the late 20th century.

The conversations are informal, humorous, angry and candid. Here, Cobain recounts his own life - from his childhood and adolescence to his days of musical discovery and later dealings with explosive fame - and offers often piercing insights into his life, music and times. The conversations heard in the film have never before been made public and they reveal a highly personal portrait of an artist much discussed but not particularly well understood.

Shot entirely on 35mm film, Schnack brings Cobain’s Northwest to life in vivid detail: the logging industry where Cobain’s father worked, the small bars where local bands played their first shows, the endlessly overcast sky. These images, nearly all of which were filmed in locations that were
key to Cobain’s life - his home, apartment, school, record label, etc. - are set to an evocative original score by noted Northwest musician and producer Steve Fisk, who produced Nirvana’s Blew EP, and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, as well as the music of more than 20 artists who influenced or touched Cobain during his life.

These elements - his own words, places that he saw and the music he listened to - come together to create an extraordinary look at a man who went from impoverished indie rocker to world famous iconic figure in less than a year.

Through Cobain’s recounting, we see a portrait of a specific moment in American history, of a generation of individuals who grew up in the midst of the wrenching societal and cultural upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s.

While Cobain never embraced the label of generational spokesman, the film makes clear that he was a thoughtful and introspective figure, and that these societal and cultural changes had a huge and profound influence on his life and art.

The film is not a documentary about Nirvana, the band Kurt fronted, nor is it even a documentary in the traditional sense. There are no additional interviews with friends, acquaintances or social critics, no archival video footage, no Nirvana music or sound-a-like soundtrack.

Director AJ Schnack assembled selections from the Azerrad interviews and merged them with newly filmed, evocative imagery of the three cities in Washington state that played a major role in Cobain’s life: Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle. The film was shot in November and December of 2005 and in March of 2006. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006.