Kurt Cobain Authorized Documentary Montage of Heck Coming to HBO

An unseen image of Kurt Cobain at home, featured in the film Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, © The End of Music, LLC/courtesy HBO

HBO has announced that filmmaker Brett Morgen’s Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck will premiere on the premium cable channel next year. Though Montage of Heck is the latest in a long line of Nirvana/Cobain films—most notably, AJ Schnack and Michael Azerrad’s About a Son—the film is being billed as the first “fully authorized” one. It was made with participation from Kurt Cobain’s family. In fact, Frances Bean Cobain, Cobain’s daughter with Courtney Love, is attached as executive producer. (There is no mention of Love in the press release, however.)

Montage of Heck takes its name from a mixtape Cobain made in the late 80s. The documentary features “dozens of Nirvana songs and performances as well as perviously unheard Cobain originals,” according to a press release, in addition to “no-holds-barred access to Kurt Cobain’s archives, home to his never-before-seen home movies, recordings, artwork, photography, journals, demos, personal archives, family archives and songbooks.”

In the press release, Morgen said:

I started work on this project eight years ago. Like most people, when I started, I figured there would be limited amounts of fresh material to unearth. However, once I stepped into Kurt’s archive, I discovered over 200 hours of unreleased music and audio, a vast array of art projects (oil paintings, sculptures), countless hours of never-before-seen home movies, and over 4000 pages of writings that together help paint an intimate portrait of an artist who rarely revealed himself to the media.

HBO currently airs the miniseries Sonic Highways, directed by Cobain’s former bandmate Dave Grohl.

Watch Nirvana’s video for “Come As You Are”:

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