Tonight we watched the world premiere of Kurt Cobain: About A Son (tiff | imdb | myspace), and it wasn’t at all what I expected. I guess I didn’t read the description that closely, because I expected a straightforward documentary. It was anything but.

The film, directed by A.J. Schnack, consisted of three threads: extensive audio interviews between Kurt Cobain and writer Michael Azerrad, footage filmed in the towns where Kurt spent his life, and music (some original score, some licensed songs…though no Nirvana songs) by Steve Fisk (who produced some of Nirvana’s music) and Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab For Cutie). There’s little question as to whether an audience would find audio interviews with Kurt Cobain compelling, and it’s safe to assume that two gentlemen with the pedigree of Fisk and Gibbard would produce a memorable soundtrack (and they did; the songs they picked and the score they used to tie it together — and especially to end the film — were perfect), but the real key was the cinematography. Creating visuals that could pull the reader along on the thread of Kurt’s words, or that could create beauty of their own, was the only way to make this format work, and Wyatt Toll did it perfectly. The time lapse footage, the waterways and lumberyards of Aberdeen and Olympia, the faces of students at his old high school, the still photos of Kurt by Charles Peterson…there was no break, no let down, no lapse in attention for the whole 96 minutes.

Schnack was very emotional as he introduced the film, but he needn’t have been. It was nearly perfect. In the Q&A after the film Azerrad said it felt like closure to share the interviews with us, after losing Kurt more than a decade ago. It felt that way for a lot of us tonight.

[tags]tiff, toronto international film festival, kurt cobain about a son[/tags]