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.

             

This one goes to 11

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A troubled, nearly transcendent duet: The Soloist

The based-on-true-story premise reads as pretty pedestrian. LA Times staffer crashes his bike, bashes his head, runs into a homeless head case and secretly virtuosic cellist, and hits upon a knockout idea for his column. Good copy leads to friendship, which leads to second chances, increased public awareness of homelessness, and so on. But The Soloist plumbs deeper into interdependence and responsibility than such cynical synopsizing lets on. It does indeed deliver the (feel-)goods, but what it lets us feel good about is failure, fleeting victories, and unnerving ambiguities.

Nathaniel Ayers wears some crazy duds, including a jacket with a patch on it that reads VISITOR. This seems apt as Nathaniel’s P-Funk-hits-the-skids outfits and erratic, verbose behaviour can render him otherworldly to amused passersby. Yet VISITOR can also be construed as ironic, given that Nathaniel’s one of 90,000 homeless people in Greater Los Angeles, a population that may not have an address but is hardly just passing through. Jamie Foxx’s performance as Nathaniel is immersive and specific. He grants Nathaniel his rightful charisma without being needlessly ingratiating. We come to care about Nathaniel terribly, but, despite the misguided efforts of director Joe Wright—more on that in a moment—we're never fooled into thinking we can fully comprehend his wildly fraught interior world. And anyway, it’s not his story.

Steve Lopez is the journalist, a workaholic in an imploding industry, and our protagonist. As their association thickens, Steve seems to believe he can save Nathaniel from drowning in marginality and madness, and this is where The Soloist, scripted by Susannah Grant from Lopez’s memoir, bucks against formula. Robert Downey Jr. invests Steve with layers of guilt and uncertainty that no amount of energy, column inches or phone calls can ease. With nuances that play out with wonderful clarity across his wearied face, Downey’s is a grounding presence. His desperation never makes a spectacle of itself, but rather burrows into his engaging surface cocksureness and flurry of conflicting desires.

Making a spectacle however seems to be Wright’s overriding raison d’être. I appreciate Wright’s willingness to infuse unabashed emotionalism into his camerawork, but there are scenes in The Soloist that, recalling Wright’s cripplingly show-offy work and penchant for bathos in Atonement, suffer from a lack of trust in the material. Wright tries too hard to externalize Nathaniel’s subjective confusion and bliss, which at its worst apes the third-act psychedelic freak-out of 2001. At times Wright verges on rendering homelessness as tastefully aestheticized and numbingly maudlin. On the other hand, the film’s rhythms are immaculate. The Soloist is partly about the transcendence of music, and, in harmony with this, Paul Tothill’s taut, melodic editing feels utterly inspired.

The Lucky Ones: coming home, hitting the road, and coming to terms with the vagaries of life during wartime

For a film attempting to grapple with a contemporary phenomena—that of American soldiers coming home after serving in Iraq—there’s something decidedly old-fashioned about Neil Burger’s The Lucky Ones, not just because the trauma, sense of displacement and strained interactions with civilians are familiar from previous films about the veterans of Vietnam, Korea or World War II, but because this story so frequently proves itself to be dependent on the sorts of implausible or at least dramatically convenient events—the guitar once owned by Elvis, the camping sex workers, the deus ex machina twister—more commonly associated with movies of old. But come to think of it, this story is actually about, among other things, the capricious nature of luck, so maybe the hokier plot twists should be respected for being somehow all of a piece, a meditation on what it means to feel overwhelmed by destiny, whether its fixed by the stars or by the stars and stripes.

Colee (Rachel McAdams) was shot in the leg. Cheever (Tim Robbins) had a Porta-potty dropped on him. TK (Michael Peña) got shrapnel in his penis, an injury he’s reluctant to discuss since it’s rendered him temporarily impotent. The younger members of this trio are only on leave while only Cheever is home for good, more than happy to say goodbye to martial life and reunite with his beloved wife. The three never met before shared a flight to JFK, but circumstances will conspire to keep them together, even hitting the road for an extended cross-country journey during which they’ll form a sort of substitute family, despite their considerable differences (and despite the fact that TK, while handsome and sometimes charming, can be really annoying, a self-proclaimed expert on everything from booze to golf to foreplay).

Sometimes The Lucky Ones can feel very predictable, especially since the characters’ weak spots are telegraphed so clearly in the first act. Sometimes it can feel sort of predictably unpredictable, such as in the scene with the aforementioned camping hookers. But as it went along and these characters—embodied superbly by all three stars—developed, I’ll be damned if the one truly unpredictable element to this thing wasn’t how funny, warm and moving it could be, sometimes in the most seemingly slight moments, like when Collee genuinely tries to comfort TK with a catalogue of alternative sex remedies, or whenever the trio quietly, pregnantly nod as yet another civilian says to them, “No, thank YOU,” the mantra of all those who can’t come close to grasping just what the hell it is these people are doing over there.

Radical Adults deserve radical books to be written about them, but for now Goodbye 20th Century will have to do

Sonic Youth holds such a tremendous yet peculiar place in music as to confound any attempt to explain it to an unknowing bystander. One can certainly propose a lineage of sorts, tracing their roots in New York visual arts and underground culture in such a way that links them to The Velvet Underground and Talking Heads, yet Sonic Youth, with its core membership of Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Thurston Moore, has blazed a trail far longer than either of these predecessors. In fact I’d be hard pressed to think of any other more or less democratically-geared rock band in history that has stayed together and remained as active and engaged, as enthused and good-humoured, as prolific while, to my ear at least, never once phoning it in.

Their music rose out of a sensibility that for all its obsessive influences still feels somehow essentially sui generis, the product of suburban kids with gravely mistreated instruments dragging their enthusiasm for pop art, the Beats, Charles Manson, science fiction and the avant garde into their parents’ garage, producing growling enactments of a head-on collision between the monolithic guitar armies of Glenn Branca, ferocities deconstructed from punk rock and no wave, shuddering B-horror movie soundtracks, and a barely secret infatuation with classic rock, pop and jazz. I’ve been in love with the band since high school, and my familiarity with their work on record or in concert only makes classification feel that much more futile.

I’d never paid too much attention to their private lives or working practices, but, coming on the crest of a wave of new or recent SY-related literature—Moore and Byron Coley Abrams’ No Wave: Post-Punk Underground New York 1976-1980 and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth are especially tempting reads—David Browne’s Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth (Da Capo, $27.95) seemed too intriguing to pass on. With a sprawling discography a quarter century of general activity under or beyond the SY moniker to draw upon, not to mention extensive interviews with SY and virtually everyone ever associated with the band, Browne’s relatively hefty tome promised something authoritative and thorough at the very least.

Though the prose is pretty baggy and the use of quotations often redundant, the facts and anecdotes collected in Goodbye 20th Century are indeed fascinating. That Gordon’s father wrote the first major study of adolescent factions, that her mother made clothes for the family, that the young Gordon once choreographed a dance based on a narrative deduced from her rearranging of her father’s jazz album covers, or that she later made a student film about Patty Hearst intriguingly conveys the roots of a highly unusual modus operandi. Reading about how ‘Teenage Riot’ was intended as a campaign song for imaginary US Presidential candidate J. Mascis, how SY were instrumental in getting Nirvana signed to DGC, how Chuck D performed his part in the ‘Kool Thing’ video while standing in a hallway between meetings, how Gordon once made dinner for Neil Young on his tour bus after buying raw meat from a roadside KFC: all of these items enliven and enrich anyone’s reading of the Sonic Youth story.

What’s seriously lacking in Browne’s book however anything like a close critical analysis of the band’s work, habits or lifestyle—and when Browne does suddenly try to get a little tough on the band’s music near the end, his observations, such as suddenly deciding that 2000's NYC Ghosts and Flowers, a record so sharpened with tension as to make your hairs stand on end, was the first time the band sounded "pretentious," seem way off the mark. Goodbye 20th Century may provide constant candy for curious SY fans but it rarely digs below the surface, offering only a vague idea as to how their songs are constructed and relying on rock critic boilerplate to describe their music. Browne also seems frequently overwhelmed by the band’s prolific output, barely giving us an idea of Ranaldo or Moore’s catalogue non-SY outings. And the culture junky nerds who will inevitably constitute a large part of this book’s readership will be irked by numerous minor errors found throughout: Nick Cave being called British, Bad Brains being called “The Bad Brains,” or William S. Burroughs’ Kansas home being located in Nebraska. (More frustrating still, while old WSB appears twice in the book’s truly superb photo inserts, the guy’s barely mentioned in the actual text!)

I suppose it would have been too much to expect a book about Sonic Youth to be even half as adventurous as the band’s music—yet an inventive approach to writing about music is so welcome when one surveys the music section of any store or library. On my own shelves I can quickly pick out the music-related titles that stand out in any way, nearly all of them diverging from the conventional model, whether it’s Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, wild, stream-of-consciousness memoirs from the likes of Iggy Pop or Bob Dylan, Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful or Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus’ The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. Compared to these, nearly all of the standard cradle-to-grave/rise-and-fall bios seem dull and formally slavish, notable mostly for their various levels of banal, groupie-screwing dirt.

Reservations aside, I’m still deeply grateful to Browne for what amounts to an enormous investment in chronicling a unique, unruly, and still unfolding chapter in music history. What does come across in Goodbye 20th Century very well—besides its catalogue of dingy NYC apartments in the early 1980s—is a sense of how several individual, highly distinctive and equally opinionated artists can get together and continually work toward developing a sound all their own while still attempting to manage something akin to a career, as well as spouses, children and mortgages. More than is usually the case, for rock at least, the story of Sonic Youth is the story of extraordinary creativity being balanced with basically ordinary lives. And the result of such alchemy is genuinely inspiring.