“I was completely blown away,” Cobain’s voice says. His friend Buzz Osborne, of Melvins fame, made him some mixes: the Stooges, Flipper, Black Flag, the Vaselines, the Raincoats, the Slits, MDC, the Sex Pistols, Bad Brains. Sound familiar? Cobain was once a teen-ager a bit like you were, looking for his people and his sound-an illustration by Cobain shows Lucy banging on Schroder’s piano and yelling, “I want punk rock, you blockhead!”-and finding himself when he did. He was searching for whatever made him feel like he wasn’t alone and he wasn’t so different.” When Morgen asks Cobain’s sister if Kurt found the underground or the underground found him, she says, “I think they found each other. Soon, he retreated to his room with a guitar. At one point, he was suicidal, but wanted to lose his virginity before dying after a sad, somewhat cruel failed sexual encounter, he had a failed suicide attempt on a train track. His stepmother says that he always wanted to be the most beloved of the siblings and stepsiblings he craved love and stability but continually found frustration and rejection. In his teen years, Cobain became unruly and bounced from house to house, living with different relatives. They divorced when he was nine, which he found not just traumatic but humiliating. His sister, Kimberly Cobain, says, “I’m so glad I never got that genius brain.” His mother, Wendy O’Connor, recalls that, as a little boy, Kurt “was so kind and so worried about people-if they were O.K., or if somebody got hurt.” The film takes us through Cobain’s childhood, in Aberdeen, Washington, showing that what began happily turned difficult when he became hyperactive, his sister was born, and his parents didn’t know how to handle him. In between, “Montage of Heck” shows the evolution of an artist.Ĭobain’s sensitivity is a focus throughout. The film ends just before his death, at twenty-seven. “I’m Kurt Cobain,” his little voice says proudly. At the beginning, we see Super-8 footage of Kurt, a blond toddler waving and blowing kisses from his stroller soon he’s wearing a sport coat and playing a tiny guitar. Morgen presents them in an artistic mashup of sound and image, interspersed with interviews with Cobain’s survivors. Much of the film, which Morgen made with the full participation of Cobain's wife, Courtney Love, his daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, and his mother, father, and sister, consists of Cobain’s own creations: there’s the music, sounding glorious as ever, as well as art work, notebooks, films, and audio recordings that had never been made public.

In Brett Morgen’s revelatory documentary “Kurt Cobain: A Montage of Heck,” which airs tonight on HBO, we see-almost from the inside-the evolution of Cobain’s sensitive brilliance and the art and destruction that it fed. Sensitivity, like a superpower, can be a glorious and terrible gift.

Kurt Cobain by Brett Morgen