Kurt Cobain heard, but not seen

In AJ Schnack's new movie about Kurt Cobain, we don't see Kurt Cobain. There's no explosive concert footage of Nirvana, no critics debating rock history, or old friends remembering when. There's only Cobain's voice, disembodied and hovering like a ghost over an impressionistic montage of logging trucks and teenagers in Aberdeen, Wash., the musician's hometown, seedy bars and filthy apartments in Olympia, Nirvana's birthplace, and the gray skies and bright lights of Seattle, where Cobain went to become a rock star. Not nearly as reluctant a rock star, we learn, as the Cobain mythology would lead us to believe.

"We learn" is the operative term here. "Kurt Cobain About a Son" is a lovely piece of filmmaking, a gripping, minimalist marriage of sound and image. But Schnack's real stroke of genius was leaving out nearly everything you expect to get in a rockumentary about a tragic hero. Cobain's life and death, by his own hand, in 1994, have been probed and analyzed in so many ways by so many observers it's a revelation to simply listen to the man talk.

Culled from 25 hours of audio interviews taped by journalist Michael Azerrad in 1992 and 1993 - mostly at the kitchen table in Cobain's Seattle house, generally in the middle of the night, for the definitive biography "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana" - Cobain's end of the conversation reveals him to be a smart, spiteful, tender, ambitious, injured guy. He loved his wife and loathed average people. When Azerrad asks, "Is yours a sad story?" Cobain responds, "No, not really. It's nothing that's amazing or anything new, for sure."

Cobain remembers draining the battery in his father's van listening to an eight-track cassette of Queen's "News of the World." He bitterly accuses his parents of self-absorption for the divorce that shattered his happy childhood and fondly recalls not correcting the high school kids who thought he was gay. The fragile rock poet who was too sensitive for the cutthroat music business - as Cobain was so often portrayed in the media - reminisces about the day he told his bandmates, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, that he deserved a bigger portion of Nirvana's paycheck as the group's songwriter and frontman. It's less startling to hear Cobain confess that "I've thought about dying all my life."

Cobain died before YouTube made everyone familiar household items, and hearing his speaking voice, which isn't part of the public record, feels incredibly intimate. At one point, Azerrad's tape recorder captures Courtney Love calling out in a sleepy voice for her husband to bring a bottle when he comes upstairs for their daughter, Frances, and for a moment we're flies on the guru's wall. We don't belong there, but then neither did he.

"I feel really homesick all the time, and so do all the other aliens," Cobain says, between what sounds like mouthfuls of cereal. When his face finally appears during the film's final seconds, it's a shock: the shock of recognition.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com