Before going to see A.J. Schnack’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son, I refused to read any reviews about it. I didn’t want my interpretation and perception of the film to be colored by anything I heard or read. I wanted to be a tabula rasa for Schnack’s work, learning more about the legendary lead singer of Nirvana through this much-touted documentary.

The heart of the film is the almost non-stop audio track of Cobain’s voice narrating his own life in a series of never-aired interviews conducted by music journalist Michael Azerrad from 1992-93. Azzerrad was interviewing Cobain for his book, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Totalling more than 25 hours, the interviews take viewers through Cobain’s childhood, adolescence, and his tumultuous rise to fame in Seattle.

About a Son is much unlike other documentaries, in that Schnack chose to incorporate no live footage of Cobain, his family, friends or colleagues. Instead, the film is comprised entirely of long shots of the places Cobain discusses in the Azzerrad interviews. For example, while Cobain tells Azzerrad about growing up in Aberdeen, WA, the camera pans over forests and city shots of the small town and its logging center where Cobain’s father worked as he grew up.

The film is also unique in that only Cobain and Azzerrad's voices are heard in the production, and it is only because the interviews were being done in preparation for writing a book that they were thorough enough to support this. While an unusual move to omit other outside interviews for the film, ultimately, the singularity of Cobain’s voice tells his story better than any other person could. This singular technique for documentary filming was a great risk, because viewers are accustomed to seeing people in films, and having to react to those people and learn from them as the film progresses. Without being visually connected to any people in the film, I was forced to listen carefully to what was happening in the audio tracks and make my own connections concerning what I was seeing and what I was hearing, instead of having those connections made for me, as is common in most films, documentary or otherwise. This type of interactivity is rare to find in films now, and I think because Cobain and Nirvana were so well known, paring down all the typical documentary details—interview with family and friends, excessive photo montages—was extremely effective in drawing audiences into the film's story.

Furthermore, so many books have been written and fan sites created about Cobain and about Nirvana, collecting anecdotes, interviews, photographs, films from people involved in the band and in Cobain’s life, that I think it was rather beautiful and refreshing to hear one man tell his own life story, even if it is now nearly 15 years after his death.