Kurt and Courtney
Written and Directed by Nick Broomfield
by Jody Boyns
BBC filmmaker Nick Broomfield has made the unintentional horror movie of the year with his freaky documentary on the lives of the grunge generation’s Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, Kurt and Courtney. In it, conspiracy theories abound over Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s apparent suicide death in 1994. You’ve probably heard all the hoopla surrounding his widow successfully getting this movie pulled from the Sundance Film Festival. Be prepared to hear plenty more from director/narrator/interrogator Broomfield as he drones on incessantly throughout the movie about how he’s thwarted at every turn by Ms. Love.
The documentary starts off innocently enough with tales from Kurt’s aunt (this sweet woman seems far out of place in this movie) on his love of music at an early age, and then we learn a little about Kurt’s Oedipal complex in a chat with his ex-girlfriend. The movie careens way off the yellow brick road once Courtney Love is introduced. We first meet her dad, Hank Harrison, a whacko who’s written a book and is plugging another, basically accusing his daughter of having Cobain killed. From there, we see various junkie friends, ex-boyfriends, and journalists who all accuse Courtney of being a complete psychopath (like father, like daughter I guess). Love has always been viewed as a glorified groupie (she had a cameo in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy as one of Nancy’s strung out friends – quite an acting stretch) but not since Tammy Faye Bakker have I seen a woman who terrified so many people. The funniest of these may be Lynn Hirschberg, a journalist Courtney attacked with Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar at the 1995 Academy Awards ceremony. While Broomfield wanted to use Nirvana and Hole songs interspersed throughout the film (Courtney, who owns all the rights, would have none of that), I couldn’t help but think the Grass Roots’ “Sooner or Later (Love is Gonna Getcha)” would’ve fit perfectly here. The most disturbing part of the film is the stupor that most of Cobain’s and Love’s friends seem to remain in some two years hence. Kurt’s “best” friend (the one who bought Kurt the rifle that ended his life) lives with a drug dealer who owns an Uzi and another Courtney lookalike is obviously still a junkie even after one of her best friends took some shrapnel to the temple. The person some consider the most horrifying ghoul in this circus of the macabre is El Duce (we know this guy’s on the up and up when we’re introduced to him by Divine Brown’s rastafarian pimp). Duce was the lead singer of the Mentors, an S & M band who hit it small with a forgettable ballad “Sex Slave” (the video complete with nude chicks getting whipped). Duce claims he was offered $50,000 to whack Cobain. What some people might find interesting is that he claims Courtney Love was the offeree. Strangely, but not surprisingly, he was killed the day after filming his interview crossing a street to make a drug deal. Coincidence or conspiracy? Tom Grant, a private investigator who was originally hired by Love to find Cobain after he checked out of the Los Angeles detox center the week before he died, is chief among the Oliver Stone groupies that believes Love had her husband murdered. During his tenure, he discovered that the police did some Fuhrmanesque work during their investigation by: a) never releasing the second suicide note that Cobain wrote (the first was more an “I’m quitting Nirvana” diatribe), b) never fully explaining why there were no fingerprints on the gun (his theory being that they were wiped off), c) discounting the theory that Cobain couldn’t have lifted a shot glass nevermind a shotgun in the heroin-induced state that he was in, d) immediately writing the death off as a suicide. The coroner in question was, get this, one of Love’s ex-boyfriends. It certainly makes for an interesting and somewhat erudite footnote to a movie chock-a-block with characters like El Duce. The movie ends on a surreal note as Broomfield and his stalkerazzi pals get tossed from a stage at an ACLU awards banquet that Courtney Love, of all people, is presiding over. Broomfield started out wanting to shoot a documentary about the death of an icon and instead got a full blown JFK Redux thrown into his lap. Did the movie sway me one way or another as to the way Cobain died? Nope. The conspiracy theory is merely a footnote here. I will say this, though – if I had friends like Cobain’s and a wife like Love, I’d be looking for a one way ticket off the planet too.
