Kurt and Courtney

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Kurt and Courtney

By the end of Nick Broomfield's controversy-plagued documentary Kurt & Courtney, I think I knew as much about Broomfield himself as I knew about Kurt Cobain or Courtney Love. The film might have begun as a biographical study, exploring the tempestuous tives of Nirvana lead singer Cobain and Courtney Love both before and after their 1992 marriage, but that's not the story it ends up telling. Instead, it becomes the tale of Broomfield's ongoing battle with Love over the making of the film -- her successful efforts to persuade MTV to withdraw funding, her objection to the use of

several songs, her attempts to intimidate anyone involved in the production.

No one can blame Broomfield for being infuriated at Love, particularly when her 11th-hour legal stunt forced Kurt & Courtney out of the Sundance Film Festival lineup. It might have been easier to sympathize with him, however, if his presence in the film weren't so consistently intrusive. Like Michael Moore, Broomfield has no qualms about filming himself in the process of making his documentary film; unlike Moore, Broomfield isn't entertaining enough to warrant all the screen time. In fact, he's just plain annoying at times, interjecting commentary over virtually every musical selection (or lack thereof) and casually referring to Cobain's hometown of Aberdeen, Washington as a "redneck logging town." Even his habit of shooting from inside the car as it pulls up to various locations feels pretentious, an attempt at you-are-there urgency which conveniently ignores that automotive jaunts hardly make for compelling cinema.

Lucky for Broomfield that his subject is such a wild and provocative one. Kurt & Courtney features as wonderfully twisted a cast of characters as any recent film has compiled: Love's estranged father Hank Harrison, whose casual aggression towards his daughter provides a frightening insight into her childhood; Love's ex-boyfriend and former Portland-area singer Rozz Rezabek, seething bitterness at the career he might have had if Courtney hadn't driven him to hate it; a one-time friend of Love and Cobain named Amy who may or may not have photos of them doing heroin together, but certainly is trying way too hard to look like Courtney. Broomfield also spends time examining rumors that Cobain's 1994 death, ruled a shotgun suicide, was actually a murder engineered by Love. This angle

Introduces us to El Duce, a demented, drunken punk band frontman who claims Love once offered him "50 grant to whack Kurt Cobain.

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