This documentary about the Nirvana singer’s demise is at its best when it uses archive interviews with fans to show the scale of their loss. Otherwise, it struggles to really convey his impact
Unfathomably, for those of us who remember it, Kurt Cobain died 30 years ago this month, at the age of 27. Kurt Cobain: Moments That Shook Music has been scheduled as the centrepiece for an evening of programming that celebrates Nirvana’s music and legacy, but the emphasis of the documentary itself is firmly on Cobain killing himself and the days surrounding his death. It uses archive video of news reports and amateur footage from people attending a vigil held in his memory, in a Seattle park, just days after his body was found. There is no Nirvana music, other than their covers of other people’s songs.
Presumably this is a rights issue, and no fault of the film-makers, but the absence of the band’s original music does highlight the documentary’s singular focus. It spends less than five minutes on the astonishing, world-dominating success that Nirvana achieved in just a few short years – and, for Cobain, the concomitant dread that seems to have accompanied that – but, at the beginning, it does contextualise them as a band concisely. There is an old Reddit thread about how 1991’s Nevermind was released closer to the Beatles’ Love Me Do than to today, and this is a stark reminder of how long ago it was that Nirvana were the biggest band in the world. We see footage of Tiananmen Square, of President George HW Bush talking about the menace of crack cocaine. There is a news report about the band’s second album, Nevermind, knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts. It is all bookended by a short, sweet interview with Cobain, conducted in the summer before he died, in which he reflects on marriage, love and being a father.
Kurt Cobain: Moments That Shook Music aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
