Released 1998
Documentary
Directed by Nick Broomfield

Nick Broomfield does not like Courtney Love. Neither do some of the other people in her life. In Broomfield's rambling, disorganized, fascinating new documentary titled "Kurt & Courtney," her father teases us with the possibility that she could have killed her rock star husband, Kurt Cobain. An old boyfriend screams his dislike into the camera. A nanny remembers there was "way too much talk about Kurt's will." A deranged punk musician says, "She offered me 50 grand to whack Kurt Cobain." A private eye thinks he was hired as part of a cover-up.

Broomfield is a one-man band, a BBC filmmaker who travels light and specializes in the American sex-'n'-violence scene. He takes his show to the Pacific Northwest to examine the unhappy life and mysterious death of Cobain--the lead singer of the grunge rock band Nirvana, apparently dead by his own hand.

Did Cobain really kill himself? No fingerprints were found on his shotgun, we're told, and the movie claims his body contained so many drugs it was unlikely he could have pulled the trigger. Broomfield's film opens with Love as a suspect, only to decide she was probably not involved, and the movie ends in murky speculation without drawing any conclusions. It's not so much about a murder investigation as about two people who won fame and fortune that only one was able to handle. Cobain probably did kill himself, but it was a defeat as much as a decision; he could no longer endure his success, his drug addiction, and his demanding wife.

In all of Broomfield's films, you meet people you can hardly believe exist. "El Duce," for example, the punker who claims Love offered him money to kill Cobain, is a character out of Fellini, or hell. At the end of the movie, we are not surprised to learn he died after stumbling into the path of a train, but we are astonished to learn he was in his mid-30s; he looks like a well-worn 50-year-old bouncer. Love's father, a former manager for the Grateful Dead, has written two books about Kurt's death, both of them unflattering to his daughter, and speaks of buying pit bulls "to put peace into our house." Assorted old friends, flames and hangers-on make appearances that seem inspired by the characters in Andy Warhol's "Chelsea Hotel." Only Kurt's Aunt Mary, who plays tapes of him singing joyously as a child, seems normal.

Why did Kurt Cobain die? Because of his drug use, obviously, from which everything else descended, including his relationship with Courtney. He was filled with deep insecurities that made him unable to cope with the adulation of his fans; he was far too weak for Love's dominating personality; drugs and booze led to chronic stomach pain, and when he climbed over the wall of his last rehab center, he was fleeing to his death.

Summary by Roger Ebert