AJ Schnack's documentary
Kurt Cobain: About a Son is constructed largely from interviews author/journalist Michael Azerrad conducted with the
Nirvana singer/songwriter when he was writing their authorized biography, Come as You Are.
About a Son is also a biography, but it relies on
Cobain's own recollections, pairing it with still photos and newly shot footage of Olympia, Seattle, and Aberdeen, WA, all intended to create the perception of seeing the world through
Cobain's eyes. There is no
Nirvana footage in the movie and there are no
Nirvana songs on the accompanying soundtrack, which instead relies heavily on songs important and influential to
Kurt, along with five interview excerpts and a couple of dreamy, atmospheric instrumentals from
Death Cab for Cutie/
Postal Service leader
Ben Gibbard and
Steve Fisk, who provided much more of this kind of background ambient music for the film. Thankfully, this soundtrack pushes the background music to the background and instead concentrates on
Cobain's influences, roughly presented in chronological order according to when the music was important to
Kurt, which means that
R.E.M. and
David Bowie show up toward the end instead of the beginning, with
Mudhoney providing the mid-album pivot. Anybody who has followed
Cobain with any interest will find the names on
About a Son familiar even if they don't know the music --
the Melvins were the first band he idolized, he was photographed in
Scratch Acid T-shirts,
Nirvana covered
the Vaselines' "Son of a Gun," here presented in its original version; really,
Arlo Guthrie's "Motorcycle Song" is the only real surprise -- but the nice thing about this soundtrack is that it doesn't try to present a revisionist history of Kurt and his times; it merely documents them (or at least his version of it) accurately. For those who lived through the late '80s/early '90s,
About a Son will evoke that era, and for those who came to
Kurt Cobain and
Nirvana later, this will give a bit of an idea of what those years felt like, which is pretty high praise for a documentary soundtrack indeed. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine