Kurt and Courtney

Kurt and Courtney (Directed by Nick Broomfield.)

Nick Broomfield’s documentary about the death of Kurt Cobain both suffers and benefits from the fact that he was prevented from using any of Cobain’s music, the rights to which his widow apparently owns.

It would have been nice to hear some of Cobain’s songs, rather than the sub-standard offerings by his old and still unknown buddies’ bands. On the other hand, the film is given a real dramatic frisson by the allegation that Courteney Love not only refused to allow Broomfield to use Cobain’s songs, but also apparently applied pressure on Broomfield’s financiers to withdraw their money and got the film banned from this year’s Sundance Festival.

In fact, Love’s attempts to have it quashed form an important part of the documentary, which expands from being solely an investigation into Cobain’s death to including issues about modern media and censorship.

It’s not long before Kurt And Courtney begins to get disturbing. Early on, hip documentary maker Broomfield travels to Aberdeen, the depressing town north of Seattle where Kurt spent his early years. There he talks to Kurt’s former headmaster who confirms that, at the age of eight, Kurt was “kicked out” of his house and ended up sleeping on the schoolteacher’s family sofa for a year.

Broomfield has made his name shooting gung-ho documentaries about reluctant subjects – South African fascist nut Eugene Terreblance, Maggie Thatcher, Heidi Fleiss. Handsome, cocky and intrepid, he sets out, boom in hand, to collar the rich, powerful and self-regarding or plain mad, with the objective of forcing them to account for themselves.

Kurt and Courtney is definitely his most controversial – and bankable – film yet. Setting out to investigate the conspiracy theories about Cobain’s death which have long lurked around the internet – some of which implicate Love, whom Cobain was apparently about to divorce – he interviews a selection of people involved with the couple.

It’s a truly bizarre cast of characters. Aside from the array of smack-addled former buddies and hangers on, there’s a private detective, originally hired by Love to find Cobain when he went missing, who now – apparently – believes the singer could not have committed suicide with all that heroin in his veins. There’s Kurt’s Aunt Mary, who now sings Christian anti-drugs songs to schoolchildren. There’s the now-dead “porn-metal” singer El Duce, who claims to have been offered $50,000 to kill Kurt. There’s Love’s father, the scary Hank Harrison, who castigates his daughter, claiming she has a history of violence, which goes back beyond the time she spent in Ireland – during which she reportedly decked somebody outside Bewley’s on Grafton Street. And finally there’s a nanny who claims that if Kurt wasn’t actually murdered “then he was driven to murder himself”.

This all leads to an entertaining finale when Broomfield finally comes face to face with his subject who, ironically, has been asked to speak at an American Council for Civil Liberties dinner.

Broomfield’s deadpan voice-over makes the most of the story’s comedic possibilities but he is never flippant about the tragedy. And while it may be unfair that he doesn’t interview anyone who might have had a good word to say about Love – Michael Stipe, say, or Edward Norton or even the other members of Hole – it is refreshing to see something that stands in wonderful, astringent opposition to the usual stream of celebrity PR puff.

One sided, undoubtedly; shambolic, yes; but haunting too. Go see. (CD)