Warning: spoilers for the movie below.

"The 20-year anniversary of his death?" director Brett Morgen said at today's Sundance Film Festival premiere of the wrenching documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. "Fuck that! What about his life?"

Startlingly personal, this revelatory documentary is not a definitive account of the band's rise and fall (no talking-head rock historians), nor is it anything else you'd likely see on VH1. And that's a good thing. For talking heads, there is literally nothing left to say that hasn't been repeated ad infinitum. Instead, Morgen's film feels like an intimate wake: a story told by the very few people who loved him most. The movie is also something of a resurrection: Cobain, that face on a dorm-room poster, becomes human again, through a cache of VHS tapes, Super 8 family movies, and excerpts from nearly 200 hours of audio. You see him at his genius, explosive best, and at his heroin-addict, mumble-mouthed worst.

"Please read through my diary, look through my things, and figure me out," Cobain once wrote to a girlfriend, in the journals Courtney Love . This new film is an invitation to do the same—likely the last significant chapter to the Cobain story. Here are eight things we discovered:

1. The film takes its name from Cobain's "Montage of Heck" mixtape.

You can listen to Cobain's startling audio collage mixtape here. But that's just a fraction of full material. Morgen picks revealing, unreleased audio, from rambling diary-style entries to distorted abstract sound collages. The film itself is something of a collage, too. As Cobain says at one point, "I use bits and pieces of other personalities to form my own."

2. Frances Bean Cobain and Courtney Love are both supporting the film.

Frances Bean gets an executive producer credit on the film and could have nixed the whole project if she'd been unhappy with the final cut. At the screening, Morgen said Courtney was hands-off: She handed him the keys to her storage facility and said, "Go through all my shit, make a fucking movie, and I'll see it when it's done." Notably, after all their clashes, Frances Bean and Courtney even hugged it out on the red carpet.

3. Cobain was a beautiful, blond-haired, blue-eyed American boy.

In home videos and snapshots, we see an adorable Kurt playing with toy guitars, drums, and a tiny piano. He dresses up in a Batman costume, and, as he grows up, you begin to see the wildness emerging, which, his mother says, led to him being medicated for hyperactivity.

4. Kurt's mother and sister also cooperated with the film.

Kurt's mother Wendy and sister Kim have almost never spoken on the record. But they, along with Kurt's stepparents and ex-girlfriends, speak plainly and lovingly about the impact his parents' divorce had on Kurt, and how his teenage rebellion led to him being punted from one relative's home to the next. "I don't know how anybody deals with having your whole family reject you," says his stepmother Jenny. After all that instability, "he wanted to be in a family, period," she adds, explaining Cobain's desire to marry and begin a family so soon with Courtney, despite his spiraling drug problem.

5. Kurt and Courtney were extremely self-aware of their fame.

The references to Rolling Stone and their famous Sassy magazine cover come fast. The mocking jokes about Guns N' Roses come even faster. (At one point, Kurt jokes that if he weren't doing heroin, he could be "snake-dancing" with Axl.) Courtney lovingly lists all of the music greats that Kurt gets compared to. And Kurt agrees with her that she's one of the two "most hated women in America," along with Roseanne Barr. In another scene, Kurt is wearing some of Courtney's fake eyelashes like a Hitler moustache, along with a satin dress, while lip-synching a horrible fan letter that blames Courtney for Nirvana's problems.

6. Kurt and Courtney made sex tapes.

The footage of Kurt and Courtney alone at home is electric, and some of it's even erotic. Though their private videos are edited to PG-13 standards, there's no doubt: Kurt and Courtney had fun with videocameras in bed. Morgen features clips of the two making out in bed.

7. Cobain was a fascinating visual artist.

The film uses stop-motion animation to bring Kurt's doodles, sketches, and elaborate art projects to life—and the sheer volume of Cobain's restless, creative output is impressive. You also see his riffs on Americana influences evolving: from childhood drawings of Oscar the Grouch to perverted teenage twists on Linus and Lucy to his visual concepts for the anarchist high-school rally of the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video. Toward the end of his life, he drew a series of disturbing but elegant conceptual self-portraits with titles like "Surrender Kurt," "Abandon Kurt," "Confused Kurt," "Resentment Kurt," and "Hurt Kurt."

8. Kurt clearly loved his daughter, but his heroin problem was ugly.

After the astonishing success of Nevermind, Kurt retreated with Courtney into their private home for about six months, enjoying their new marriage and fondness for heroin. Courtney says that Kurt once told her his goal was to "get to three million dollars and then be a junkie." But, toward the end of the film, there's also incredibly touching video of Kurt being a blissed-out, doting father, doing any ridiculous thing to make his little girl laugh, and marveling at his happiness. (At the post-film Q&A, Morgen said they were "so happy... like Ozzie and Harriet on heroin.") Soon, though, he is rattled by suspicions that Courtney might have an affair and sinks deeper into his heroin addiction. When Frances Bean gets her first haircut, she sits on Kurt's lap. He's so fucked up that he can't keep his eyes open or speak in anything but an indecipherable mumble. When he protests that he's "not high," but "just tired," as he nearly falls off his stool, it's utterly and absolutely tragic.

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*Note: The original photo accompanying this article appears to have been flipped, so we have replaced it with another image.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck arrives in theaters on May 4th.

Logan Hill Logan Hill, a veteran of New York, Vulture, and GQ, has spent twenty years covering the arts for outlets including Elle, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, This American Life, TimesTalks, Wired, and others.

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