Brazenly sleazeball documentary, poking into the "various conspiracy theories" around the apparent suicide in 1994 of grunge-rocker Kurt Cobain. It is a reeling, lurching mess of a movie, assembled in slapdash fashion from archive footage, interviews, and travelling shots en route to interviews, all plastered together with the phlegmatic first-person narration of British filmmaker Nick Broomfield ("My co-funders started to get pressure from Courtney's people"). Broomfield, well on his way to making a specialty of interviewing people who cannot be believed (Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam), is forever thrusting himself between the titular twosome -- Cobain and Love, respective lead singers of Nirvana and Hole, besides husband and wife -- into the role of torch-bearing, stone-overturning, truth-seeking hero. And the general drift of his investigation, like that in any hard-boiled detective novel, takes him further and further towards the fringe, with a lineup of interviewees that stretches through Kurt's Aunt Mary (playing audio tapes of her nephew's singing career circa age two), his earliest girlfriend (showing off Kurt's adolescent artwork, scrutinized for evidence of an unbalanced mind), Courtney's estranged father ("I'm not in the business of trying to get Courtney to love me"), an L.A. private eye hired at one time by Courtney and now dedicated to proving her culpability in her husband's death, Kurt's long-time best friend (whose sentence structure is founded unfailingly on the building block of "I mean, it's like ..."), a couple of "stalkarazzi" celebrity photographers, a paunchy rock singer with the hybrid name of "El Duce" who claims Courtney offered him $50,000 to kill Kurt and who has since gotten himself run over by a train, and others. The movie becomes more entertaining -- more like a segment on Unsolved Mysteries, with Broomfield pinch-hitting for Robert Stack -- as it becomes more discreditable. But even then you might get a bit tired of trying to calculate the kind and amount of mind-altering substance ingested by a given interviewee. Belief in Cobain's standing as (in Broomfield's narration) a "brilliant artist," a "folk hero," and an "icon," to say nothing of belief in his standing as a murder victim, would doubtless give a boost to your stamina. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.