Kurt Cobain About a Son (2007)

As an illustrated audio tour through the life of a gifted but self-destructive performer, 'About a Son' is enlightening to a point, but one has to wonder when filmmakers will stop exhuming the corpse of a man who desperately craved privacy.

Shaped from Cobain's own words, the film tells his story with care, in inventive style and without phony reverence or pretentious pronouncements.

Most of the material has never been made public before, so the movie is a must-see for Cobain fans. Even for non-fans, it is quite an astonishing document. Up to a point.

Allows the fans that the legendary musician will keep gathering for decades to come a brief look inside Cobain's troubled mind, and it does so in a refreshingly bold and innovative way.

A fascinating plunge into one man's thicket of contradictions.

There is much to fault in this tedious exercise in pseudo-hipster cool masquerading as, well, what exactly?

Startlingly de-mythologizing at first, then just plain poignant . . . it's fascinating to reconcile Cobain's slacker howl over chipping guitar chords with a sodden Pacific Northwest of logging trucks and fishing boats.

Many of the images aren't particularly compelling and neither, frankly, are Cobain's comments, which range from dull anti-press diatribes to familiar stories about the musical influence of his Aunt Mary to inarticulate blather.