First Look: The Kurt Cobain Documentary Premiering at Sundance

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A first look at an animated segment from Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

Kurt Cobain’s run with Nirvana lasted only seven years before his suicide in 1994. But both his music and personal life were so complex, that 21 years after his death, we’re still learning details about the musician. Now, the first authorized documentary promises to reveal even more about the troubled grunge godfather — and it will use cartoons to do it.

Director Brett Morgen’s Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck will premiere at Sundance this weekend, offering up a new vision of the late star. The film, according to the synopsis, “blends Cobain’s personal archive of art, music, written word, and never-before-seen home movies, with animation and revelatory interviews from his family and closest confidantes.”

Above, you can see a still from that animation, which looks like it’s a hand-rotoscoped sequence of the dark Northwest childhood that so shaped Cobain’s music and life. It’s a lush painting, which also serves as a reminder that Cobain himself was quite a prolific artist.

After its bow at Sundance, the movie will air on HBO on May 4.