Dying in public

“You should be stronger than me,” goes one of numerous queasily portentous lyrics heard during Amy, Asif Kapadia’s documentary about the late British jazz and soul singer Amy Winehouse. Winehouse delivered those words with the same playful, dexterous, at times almost abstract vocal style that characterized all her music—like Billie Holiday, Winehouse had a way of rendering heavy sentiments with a disarming, sometimes teasing coo. But the words of ‘Stronger Than Me’ reverberate through this devastating film because we can’t help but wonder if things would have turned out very differently had Winehouse’s family, friends, lovers, collaborators and business partners been a little stronger. It’s not an unreasonable expectation, given that Winehouse was still a teenager when she began her career, which rocketed her to stardom before coming to a screeching halt in 2011, when Winehouse, at age 27, died from alcohol poisoning and complications arising from various addictions and bulimia.  

Amy features a running voice-over that weaves together several new interviews with those who knew and worked with her into a grand collective testimony (or port-mortem). But, echoing Kapadia’s earlier documentary Serra, Amy restricts its visual component entirely to archival materials, including a great deal of casual video made on consumer-grade cameras and cell phones—Winehouse was young enough to be a member of a generation accustomed to making videos of virtually everything they do. The result can be arrestingly intimate, as well as crappy looking, and, given the deep, morbid unease that grows over the course of the film, it is not altogether dissimilar to a found-footage horror film. We start out watching someone with tremendous talent come to realize her potential for creative and commercial success, but it’s not too long before we get wise to where this is all inevitably leading: we’re watching someone fall into a pit, grasping at loose dirt along the way. We’re watching someone devoid of coping tools struggle to navigate addiction and fame at its most oppressive. We’re watching someone die in public. 

Which is to say that Amy makes a perfect companion piece to Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, replete with the codependent and enabling addict spouse as a key character in the story. (Though in Winehouse’s case the figure in her life who appears to carry the heaviest burden of guilt in facilitating her collapse is her father, who’s actually mentioned in ‘Rehab,’ Winehouse’s brilliant, blackly comic hit, as dissuading her from seeking help.) There is, of course, an obvious difference between Amy and Montage: Montage made extremely creative use of archival materials—home movies, journals, tape recordings, et cetera—to create a film bearing a certain aesthetic kinship to its subject’s work and incorporated new material—interviews, animation—when necessary. Amy, by contrast, is slavish about its formalist conceit—other than the use of written lyrics superimposed on screen, there’s nothing visual in Amy that isn’t archival. I often admire films that apply rigour to a formal proposal, but so little of what’s on screen in Amy is compellingly cinematic and there are several scenes where the clumsily shot footage feels like a placeholder as we work through the narrative. I wonder whether or not this choice really helps the film tell its story or simply limits how that story is told. 

            

His nest of salt

“You better buckle up,” Kurt Cobain’s mother said to him upon first hearing Nirvana’s Nevermind on her living room stereo, “because you are not ready for this.” Me and however many million other kids were, of course, more than ready. We were hungry, eager to identify, with no real notion as to what despair fuels such inspired, unholy, transcendent pop cacophony. Cobain was gone before we knew what hit us.

It is the despair, above all, that is the subject of Brett Morgan’s Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. This is not biography in any conventional sense. Exposition is largely, smartly relayed via archival materials and the tremendous wealth of diaries, drawings, music video outtakes, home movies and audio recordings entrusted to Morgan by the keepers of the Cobain estate. There are new interviews, but they are used sparingly, photographed in low light, sometimes framed in profile, and the subjects are few in number. We don’t hear from famous friends or collaborators or cultural commentators. Morgan keeps it in the family, speaking only with Cobain’s parents and sister, his first girlfriend, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and, yes, Courtney Love. And that’s it. Most of what we see and hear is drawn from Cobain’s personal effects, the journaling and the drawings sewn together in a highly inventive manner that feels true to the spirit in which they were originally crafted. In some places Morgan employs animated reenactments that elegantly invoke a gloom and wonder that feels particular to the Pacific Northwest. He uses Cobain’s music as interpreted by Nirvana and others in unpredictable, resonant ways. True to its name, Montage of Heck is an intricate weave chronicling a life that seems to have always been perched upon the edge of some personal abyss. It’s an often brilliant movie. It is not a fun movie.

The trajectory itself is familiar: divorce, medication for hyperactivity, an adolescence spent breaking windows, smoking weed, and stealing booze. There’s an awful story of virginity loss and a first suicide attempt. In these stories we trace not only Cobain’s psychic fragility but also something of the resources for his art and personal politics. The first half or so of Montage of Heck feels guided by a musical sensibility that’s arguably akin to the darkness and exhilaration of Nirvana’s music, but the second half is deeply mimetic of Cobain’s more private desolation, perhaps to a fault. We dive long and deep into crudely made videos of Cobain and Love in their wreck of a home, playing, babbling semi-coherently. Love seems very pleased with her breasts. Eventually Love is pregnant and still the flow of drugs appears to continue. Eventually Frances Bean is born and there are questions as to whether or not the parents should have custody. Will fatherhood save Cobain from self-destruction? We know the answer, but still brace ourselves as Cobain’s life winnows down to a space in which only he is left, and then not even he. I wonder if this last section could be too much for some viewers. It’s too much for me, and Cobain kind of meant everything to me when he killed himself. But I admire Montage of Heck, and, for all the superfluous rock star profiles in this world, I think we might need this one.