Cobain: Montage of Heck

Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Brett Morgen with something no previous Nirvana film had ever secured: complete cooperation from the estate, the surviving band members, and Cobain's family, who gave access to private recordings, diaries, and home footage that had never been seen publicly.

Morgen builds the portrait in layers — animated sequences drawn from Cobain's own notebooks, Super 8 footage from his years in Aberdeen, Washington before anyone outside the Pacific Northwest knew his name, and raw interviews with Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl, Courtney Love, Frances Bean Cobain, and people from his childhood. The film is at its strongest in those early sections: a teenager in a dead-end port town who hadn't yet been handed a generation's grief to carry.

At 132 minutes it earns its runtime. The Academy Award-nominated director landed the film at Sundance and later on HBO, where it picked up wide attention — but the material itself does the work. Stream Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) online on iFILM.