Rock Stars Are Real People Too: Kurt Cobain in About a Son versus Ian Curtis in Control

I just watched two films about two music icons -- last night I went to a screening of About a Son, the new documentary from Michael Azerrad about Kurt Cobain of Nirvana based on 25 hours of never-heard-before interviews he conducted with Kurt about a year before he committed suicide. This morning I went to see Control, a film based on the life of Ian Curtis of Joy Division shortly before he took his own life.

Of course, there are a lot of similarities between the two films and their respective subjects. Both films are "personal" accounts of artists as human beings. At the screening, Azerrad expressed how he really wanted his film to focus on Kurt as a person, not as a God. He wanted to strip away all the iconography and whittle the story down to just Kurt's regular day life and thoughts. Azerrad did this by layering excerpts from his Kurt interviews over imagery of not Kurt, but of regular people from Kurt's hometown of Aberdeen. There wasn't any Nirvana music used at all but other songs like Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" and The Vaselines' "Son of a Gun" were used to move the storyline along. (Barsuk released the soundtrack.)



Control director Anton Corbijn himself stated, "Control is a personal film. It is not a music film..." Unlike Azzerad, Corbijn chose to tell this tale in black and white with actors portraying the story. He also used several Joy Division songs via concert-based scenes to help show the progression of Curtis' deteriorating mental state throughout the film. Songs included "Love Will Tear Us Apart," "She's Lost Control" and "Transmission." (Rhino is releasing the Control soundtrack which also includes previously unreleased tracks from the surviving members of Joy Division -- also known as New Order.) Newcomer Sam Riley did an excellent portrayal of Ian Curtis...



The biography of both Kurt and Curtis run parallel as well. Rock and roll. Angsty poetry. Marriage. A Baby. Drugs. Wanting to run away to a bigger city. Physical pain and ailments. Depression. Songs about alienation. Quick fame. Mental breakdowns. Suicide. Both Kurt and Curtis seemed to feel that fame somehow boxed them into lives they didn't intend to lead. Both problematic lives also compounded by each's physical ailments -- Kurt with his stomach and back problems medicated by heroin and Curtis with his epileptic fits medicated by a slew of random pills.

However, what is clearly different about these two people is how each processes, reacts and thinks about their family life. Kurt leaned on his wife Courtney and welcomed his daughter Frances into his life, even saying that when Frances was born, things seemed to be better in his life. Curtis was the opposite. He kept referring to his marriage with Debbie as a mistake, had an on-road affair and seemed to hardly pay attention to his baby daughter Natalie.

And while both stories did end in suicide, the feeling that I was left with as an audience member was wholly different. Yes, I felt sadness for both tragedies. But I also felt like there is no separating artists from their human self and vice versa.