Kurt Cobain: About a Son

Kurt Cobain: About a Son (2007) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Its raw material: more than 25 hours of audio recorded by music journalist Michael Azerrad while researching his book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. The tapes sat unreleased for years before director AJ Schnack built a film around them.

No concert footage, no talking heads. Schnack runs Cobain's voice over images of Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle — the towns that shaped him. Cobain talks about growing up, about the early bands, about the slow collapse of his health, about carrying the weight of a generation he never volunteered to represent. Unguarded, precise, at times funny. The gap between the public figure and the voice on the tape is considerable.

For anyone who already knows the music, this film asks a different question: not who made Nevermind, but who was sitting in that room talking into a recorder. Stream Kurt Cobain: About a Son (2007) online on iFILM.