Blurry picture: Cobain's words but not his music

This isn't so much a movie documentary as it is an audio book with visuals.

You don't even have to watch the screen most of the time to get what it has to offer because the footage is largely superfluous. Some is even pitiful, especially the reenactments, the lingering close-ups of people who have nothing to do with the story, and the corny, amateurish animation.

It's like a travelogue with Kurt Cobain supplying the narration. The dialogue is taken from tapes of interviews biographer Michael Azerrad conducted with grunge's greatest star about a year before his suicide (an act which the interviews clearly show was long in the planning).

While it's fascinating, sometimes funny and often chilling to hear this voice from the grave — especially when he matter-of-factly talks about the dark, destructive sides of his personality — little is revealed because all the juiciest, best quotes have already been widely disseminated via Azerrad's 1993 biography, "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana."

Like the book, the film postulates that place had a lot to do with Cobain's music, so there are sweeping aerial and land views of Aberdeen, Hoquiam and Montesano, where he grew up; Olympia, where Nirvana's career took off; and Seattle, where he finally lived and died.

Sometimes the scenes correlate with the narration, as when Cobain tells of sleeping under a bridge in Aberdeen, lists the schools he attended, and describes places vital to his life and career. But, since the locales are rarely identified, it helps to have some foreknowledge of what you're looking at.

Occasionally the visuals don't make sense, like when Cobain talks about the music scene in Seattle when he arrived here, and on the screen are images of Neumos, Re-Bar and Chop Suey, none of which existed until long after he died. Azerrad makes a cameo toward the end of the film but, like everyone else in the movie, he is not identified.

The strangest thing about the movie is that we never see Kurt Cobain in action — except for the familiar, iconic black-and-white freeze-frames by grunge photographer Charles Peterson — and we never hear Nirvana's music, for reasons never given. Those lapses lend the documentary an incomplete, superficial, cheap feeling, and leave the lingering odor of cashing in, one more time, on Cobain's legacy.

The 14 songs on the soundtrack, most of them chosen because they impacted Cobain's life and music, include quality cuts from David Bowie, R.E.M., Iggy Pop, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Mudhoney, the Vaselines and the Melvins. Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and local producer/musician Steve Fisk contribute incidental music.

Patrick MacDonald: 206-464-2312 or pmacdonald@seattletimes.com