'Cobain' director breaks down key scenes

When Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, he left behind a legacy defined by music but shrouded in mystery. He also left countless home movies, recordings, journal entries and drawings — 85% of which have been unseen and unheard until new documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, which opens in select cities Friday and premieres on HBO May 4 (9 p.m. ET/PT).

With the blessing of Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, and daughter Frances Bean Cobain (who serves as executive producer), filmmaker Brett Morgen pored through the family archives to explore Kurt's life, from birth until months before his death at 27. In doing so, he painted a portrait that Love called "as close to the truth as anybody's ever going to get" at New York's Tribeca Film Festival this week.

USA TODAY discusses four of the film's crucial moments with Morgen.

1. Kurt's rock star ambitions — and feelings of isolation — come across in early home movies.

Early in the project, Morgen reached out to Kurt's mother, Wendy Cobain, who had thoroughly documented his childhood through mementos and Super 8 home movies. Ranging from the time he was 6 months to 8 years old, "I remember thinking it was extraordinary that nobody had ever seen this," Morgen says. With countless videos of Cobain drawing pictures, playing instruments and striking "rock star poses," it was "just the very seeds of it all happening."

But as he got older in the footage, "the camera started to drift away from him a bit and he became less central in the material" — around the same time Kurt grew more rebellious and began moving between various family members' homes.

"One of the things we realized in this film are that Kurt's problems didn't start when he met Courtney or became famous or was on heroin," Morgen says. "They were rooted in his youth."

2. Kurt narrates his first sexual encounter, after which he considers suicide.

Morgen discovered 108 cassettes while digging through the Cobain archives, one of which was a collection of spoken-word recordings he made as an adult, reading from journal entries. While he delivered most of the readings in jest, there was one that stood out to the filmmaker, in which Cobain recounted his first sexual encounter with a special-needs girl when he was just 14. "When he got to school, all the kids were waiting to laugh at him, and Kurt says, 'I couldn't handle the ridicule, so I went to the train tracks to kill myself,' " Morgen says.

One thing that struck Morgen was Cobain's detached, aloof tone in recounting the story ("It almost sounds like he's got a Cheshire Cat grin"). But also the line, "I couldn't handle the ridicule." That "resonated across all his materials — this idea of humiliation, shame, guilt and ridicule," Morgen says. "It was at that point I felt I had landed on a through line of action."

3. Kurt and Courtney are perceptive about fame in intimate footage.

Deep into the film's edit, Morgen got a call from former Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, who shot extensive home video of Kurt and Courtney with Frances, but had just found footage of Kurt and Courtney alone. "It was in some respects the missing link in my narrative," Morgen says. "It's by far the most intimate and most revealing in terms of what their relationship was like behind closed doors."

In one scene, Kurt and Courtney are standing in their towels in the bathroom as Kurt shaves and Courtney flashes the camera, laughing and bantering throughout. "You could see the affection they had for each other. The scene is absolutely hilarious, it's almost like a sitcom," Morgen says. But it also reveals their self-awareness as they talk about the media and Courtney acknowledges that she's the "most hated woman in America."

Shot in spring 1992, "it seemed like Kurt couldn't stop obsessing (about) the media," Morgen says. "It's very funny on the surface, but underneath, I couldn't help but think how damaging that might've been."

4. Kurt holds Frances while high on heroin in what Morgen calls an "important" but "brutal scene."

Frances was only 20 months old when Kurt took his life, and hadn't seen many of the home videos in Montage of Heck until she watched the documentary. While most of the clips are heartwarming scenes of Kurt and Courtney doting on their daughter, there's one that's especially unsettling: Kurt, high on heroin, holds Frances as Courtney cuts her hair. "He's still singing to her and trying to be as affectionate as he can, but he's also heavily doped and you can see he's losing his battle," Morgen says.

Showing it to Frances for the first time, "she didn't blink. She told me she wanted to keep it in the film. I think it gave her a deeper understanding of what her father was struggling with."

Days before the film screened at Sundance Film Festival in January, Morgen showed it to Courtney and Frances. "When that scene unfolded, Frances later told me that Courtney leaned over and said, 'I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.' "