Nirvana enthusiasts may run weeping to find solace in their original vinyl copies of Bleach at the news that a Kurt Cobain movie is on the cards. Or a second Kurt Cobain movie, if you count Gus van Sant’s woozy Last Days (which began life as a film about the Nirvana frontman — much as van Sant’s Elephant started out as a Harmony Korine-scripted picture specifically about the Columbine shootings — before mutating into something more amorphous).
But I think grungeheads (who will be wincing even now at my use of the word “grunge”) can rest easy. The film is being written by Oren Moverman, the 44-year-old Israeli film-maker best known in this country for co-scripting Todd Haynes’s fractured Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There. He received a Best Original Screenplay nomination (with Alessandro Camon) for The Messenger, about two men working in the US army’s casualty notification service, which Moverman also directed. (The film has yet to open in the UK.)
I spoke to Moverman last week, when he revealed exclusively this information about the Kurt Cobain biopic, which he is currently writing:
Working on the Cobain script is an enormous responsibility. You’re basically saying you’re going to find a two-hour representation in movie form of one man’s entire life. It happens to be an extraordinary, creative life and I’ve got to stand by it and say, “This is how it happened.” Well, you can’t do that. Even with someone like Cobain, who only lived 27 years, there was so much going on, he was so complicated. The question is: how do you fit that into a movie?
It’ll be raw and chaotic, which is what Cobain’s life was like, but it’s more linear than I’m Not There, in the writing stage at least; it’ll take you from A to Z, it’s not a jigsaw puzzle. The most important thing with a biopic is to let the subject dictate the form. You have to take your cues from the subject, and find what will enrich our understanding of him and his work. Musical biopics, or ones about artists, like Pollock or Love Is the Devil, they address the same impulse — to find out how a person becomes creative, and how he or she arrives at the output they give to the world and which makes them famous. It’s about creativity, the creative mind: what’s the story behind someone who lives that life? What don’t we know?
That’s my approach to Cobain, because there’s so much I didn’t even know. I realised this is a fascinating person who has a side most people didn’t even know about. People know the shortcut version — he took a lot of heroin, wrote “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, married Courtney Love, became the biggest rock star in the world and killed himself. Those known things about him are, to me, the least interesting. I mean, I liked Last Days, and the way it was influenced by the idea of what Kurt’s final days were like, but for me the suicide is not the most interesting thing about Kurt Cobain. It’s the life that I’m aiming to look at.
What’s interesting is what he did as an artist when he thought no one was looking — not just as a musical artist, but a visual one. Also, while his relationship with celebrity was different to Dylan’s, and you want to try to reflect that, his reluctance was not dissimilar. It’s that push-pull desire to be so famous, yet not really wanting it. It will be about a man’s life, his creative impulses, where they come from and what they say about him and his country, the world he walks into. Hopefully it will leave you with images you’ve never had before of this man and what he’s done.
Moverman told me that he had previously warned Haynes off the idea of making a Dylan biopic when the idea was first mooted. “Being the visionary that I am,” he said jokingly,
but also the careful friend, I said to him I thought it was a really bad idea. He asked why and I replied that if he makes a film about Bob Dylan it’s basically going to be a film about casting, about the question of: “Where did you find this amazing guy who looks like Dylan, sounds like Dylan?” The truth of the matter is that even Dylan couldn’t tell you who he is. I said, “Wouldn’t it be more interesting if you had, say, ten different characters and they weren’t Bob Dylan but they all played different aspects of his life? And together they could add up to the Bob Dylan experience.” Todd looked at me and said: “Now that sounds like a Todd Haynes film!”
I pointed out that any film about Kurt Cobain will need to overcome exactly the same sort of hurdle. “Absolutely,” Moverman agreed.
That’s the worst part of it. Because there’s only one person who can really play him, and he’s dead. Other than the actual person, everything you do is imitation. It’s a terrible thing because you want to tell a story, and be as interesting as possible, and yet you have this limitation which most biopics labour under, I’m Not There being an exception, which is that someone has to look and sound like the subject. How do you transcend the casting part of that, and make a movie interesting and deep enough that you can forget that?
I can’t wait to find out.
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