As an effort to "decanonize," it succeeds at slaying some canards. The idea of Cobain as the consummate slacker, for example, seems nuts given the voracious work ethic and ambition on display. He was unemployed while living with girlfriend Tracy Marander, but she describes regularly returning from a day of work to find Cobain had made and hung a painting, or drawn a comic strip, or written a song. Montage of Heck also undermines some fans' belief that Cobain was manipulated to his doom by Love; in home videos, their rapport appears warm and sensitive, and he seems of sound mind and sure about exactly who he's in love with. “You’re already the most hated woman in America," he taunts as he shaves his face in their apartment bathroom while she flashes the camera. "You and Rosanne are tied."

But it’s not quite right to say that Montage of Heck is anti-mythologizing. It’s almost impossible to imagine how it could be. The movie, for the most part, reinforces the common Cobain narrative: genius misfit clashes with parents and society, starts a band, conquers the world, gets hooked on heroin, hates fame, kills himself. At every turn, we’re reminded that this was Cobain’s own narrative; in journals, in lyrics, and in interactions with friends, he talked about not only the desire for suicide but the reasons for it, including feeling like a phony regarding his acclaim, and feeling guilty that he didn't enjoy his success. He vehemently rejected the “voice of a generation” tag placed on him, but the film also makes clear that the popular understanding of the messages in his music—rage at conservative social mores, expressions of self-loathing, odes to screwed-up intimacy—is correct.

In some ways, Montage of Heck does cut Cobain down to human size. The defining traumas of his early life, we see, were his parents’ divorce, his father's frostiness, and his peers' taunts—all vivid and scarring for him, but banal as far as legend-making material goes. At one point, Cobain talks about loving the movie Over the Edge, and Morgen treats viewers to an excerpt of the film in which kids lock their parents in school and start a riot. The message is the same as the one that famously opens In Utero: On some level, Cobain was caught up in nothing more than classic, teenage angst.

But the fact that his concerns were so ordinary just makes his trajectory, his talents, and his wild, magnetic personality, all the more extraordinary. In the opening moments of the film, his sister says she’s grateful that she didn’t get that “genius brain” of his. She’s right to call him a genius—Montage of Heck, in addition to everything else, reminds of how electrifying Nirvana's music was—and she’s also right to see his psychic makeup as a burden. Even after getting such an in-depth portrait of his life and character, the depths of Cobain's mounting despair and disaffection feels, toward the end of the film, inexplicable, awful, and unrelatable. Cobain and the world knew he was hurtling toward destruction—“I feel like people want me to die because it would be the classic rock and roll story,” he mutters at one point—and either he chose to embrace that fate or he had no choice at all. It's the kind of outcome that can't fully be understood, which is to say it's the kind of outcome that people have always needed myths to help explain.

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