A documentary by AJ Schnack. Unrated. Plays Thursday to Wednesday, January 3 to 9, at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que

What would have pleased Kurt Cobain most about AJ Schnack's Kurt Cobain About a Son is that 98 percent of the people who made him famous will hate it. As the director's unconventional biopic makes clear, the late Nirvana frontman had zero use for most of his fellow North Americans. Coming from the DIY underground, where he was raised on the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, and the Meat Puppets, Cobain believed in music as provocative art, not something safe to be force-fed to the zombified masses on MTV.

About a Son is not a film for those who bought Nevermind and then listened only to "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Schnack has sifted through 25 hours of taped interviews done between Cobain and journalist Michael Azzerad, who wrote the 1993 book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Those interviews–which cover everything from childhood memories to post-success ramblings on alternative rock–form the backbone of a movie that shoots for art, not commerce. Forget the usual mix of talking heads and bootleg videos; what you get is Cobain's often poorly recorded voice set to beautifully shot images that are sometimes only loosely associated with his words. Whether it be tableaux of the specific (Olympia coffeehouses) or the everyday (bathed-in-alien-green-light escalators), the results are often nothing short of poetic.

Musically, Schnack loads up the soundtrack with the artists that made Cobain who he was. As a result, the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, et al become more than background music; they become essential reference points for understanding Nirvana's work, especially the post-Nevermind commercial disappointment that was In Utero. What is perhaps most striking regarding About a Son is that through the lens of Wyatt Troll, Aberdeen's sawmills and blue-collar streets take on an almost doomed Lynchian beauty. It's well-documented that the white-trash, Washington logging town scarred the singer, turning him into the tortured genius that made him a millionaire. Give About a Son credit for turning ugliness into something breathtaking. Because that's something Cobain had a talent for, you somehow know that he would approve.