Beyond the Multiplex

Kurt Cobain took the best paths available to him on his road from miserable obscurity in Aberdeen, Wash., to intensely symbolic pop-culture stardom, or such is the implication of "Kurt Cobain: About a Son," the extraordinary montage film by AJ Schnack that premiered at SXSW on Monday. (Actually, it premiered in Toronto last fall, but this was the first showing of the final theatrical version.) Cobain's face is not seen in the film until its final moments, but it's entirely narrated by him, over an evocative stream of images showing places he lived, went to school, worked and played.

Schnack worked with reporter Michael Azerrad (author of the book "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana") to edit the latter's extensive 1992-93 audio interviews with Cobain into an approximate narrative, then set out to shoot a film to accompany it. He went to Aberdeen, to Olympia, Wash., and to Seattle, the three places Cobain lived, and shot people and places in those cities as he found them today. So "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" isn't exactly a documentary, or at least it's a highly unconventional one. It contains no archival footage, no talking-head interviews with friends or bandmates or family members, no voice-over from a semi-hip celebrity (Sting? Parker Posey?) telling us what to think.

It's something else, something that combines impressionistic biography, poetic film essay (in the spirit of Godfrey Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi" and its sequels) and psychiatric session or confession. Cobain comes off as strikingly intelligent and self-critical at many moments, and at others angry and defensive to the point of paranoia. It seems clear that the kid who roamed around Aberdeen banging a bass drum and singing Beatles songs, and who embraced gay identity in high school (even though he was straight), had a marvelous capacity for self-invention. But he also seems to be a permanently wounded, aggrieved personality, unable to let go of past injuries large and small, driven onward by an unhappy nexus of pain and desire.

No single film or book can dispel the cloud of enigma surrounding Kurt Cobain, but simply sitting in the dark and hearing him talk to you for 90 minutes, while the dreary gray-green beauty of his home state moves through your eyeballs and into your brain, goes a pretty long way. You can't make it through "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" without concluding that this tremendously talented young man (he'd have turned 40 this spring) was battling suicidal depression his entire life.

It's almost a wonder that Scott Walker didn't shoot himself. The subject of Stephen Kijak's absorbing film "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man," another SXSW premiere, is an Ohio native with a distinctive baritone voice who became a major British pop star in the '60s as one-third of the singing Walker Brothers. They weren't brothers and weren't named Walker; in fact, they were pretty much that era's version of a boy band. Their biggest hit was "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore," which remains a staple of oldies radio. But it's Walker's later story that gets weird.

When the band broke up, Walker was first a popular solo artist, blending brassy British orchestral pop with Jacques Brel material and elements of art music -- and then a massively unpopular one. He has spent the last 30 years largely in seclusion, emerging roughly once a decade to release another album of experimental sonic material so far outside the mainstream as to be uncategorizable. He long ago left anything you could really call pop music behind, except as a source for instrumentation and a kind of flavor ingredient, but calling him a classical or avant-garde artist isn't entirely right either.

Walker borrows ideas from surrealism, existentialism and World War II history; his lyrics and song titles refer to Bergman films, weapons systems, disputes in Marxist theory. Or they seem to; as Walker explains to Kijak, his songs actually use those real-world labels to refer to a dark, hermetic personal universe. On his most recent album, "The Drift" (2006), Walker's instrumentation includes an inverted garbage can, a slab of short ribs and various bits of industrial machinery. His gorgeous baritone, already stressed by time (he's 64), is deliberately strained to the edge of listenability.

If it's difficult to explain how Noel Scott Engel (Walker's real name), who sang with Fabian on '50s TV, could have morphed into this deliberately obscurantist icon, it's a lot easier to identify musicians Walker has influenced. A pile of them appear in the film, from David Bowie (who serves as executive producer) to Brian Eno, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Thom Yorke, Marc Almond, Alison Goldfrapp and almost anybody else, it seems, in the more ambitious realms of British pop. Fans of Bowie and Eno's '70s collaborations, in particular, will suddenly identify a major source of Eno's walls of sound and Bowie's musique-concrète lyrics.

Personally, I've always found Walker's dense and challenging soundscapes easier to appreciate on an intellectual level than to listen to. But during his interviews with Kijak during the recording of his 2006 album "The Drift," Walker comes off as a charming, unpretentious fellow as well as one of the few authentic geniuses in a realm of pompous idiots. Like the best music documentaries, "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man" blends grace and mystery. It should delight longtime Walker fans and introduce him to new ones.

Most of the visiting movie-biz types, including yours truly, are sadly packing our bags as SXSW's movie wing winds down and the even larger music conference gets rolling. (Both the Cobain and Walker films will play several more times for those crowds.) One last film I'm delighted I caught before leaving town was Laura Dunn's documentary "The Unforeseen," which premiered at Sundance -- it's produced by Robert Redford -- but had its homecoming here. It's a beautiful, soulful work about real estate development and sprawl, focused on Austin's beloved Barton Springs, and if you think that's impossible you haven't seen it.

Dunn never pretends to be a neutral party (no one has yet made a documentary that's pro-sprawl, as far as I know) but she presents developer Gary Bradley, a perennial villain to the Austin left, as a human being with admirable drive and complicated motivations. Most of Dunn's interviewees and sources -- including Willie Nelson, poet Wendell Berry, the late Ann Richards and Redford himself -- come down on the other side, of course, and the governing mood is of both anger and lamentation. But "The Unforeseen" is much more than a plucky local movie about issues that matter only in this delightful, self-obsessed collegiate boomtown.

Battles over development can be found in every American county, and probably in every other jurisdiction in the world, and they all involve real, complicated human beings on all sides. Another of Dunn's producers is Terrence Malick, and his poetic pictorial sensibility seems to permeate the piece. In fact, "The Unforeseen" is less an issue-driven documentary than a pure visual and sensual experience that seeks to capture the mystery of the American landscape, both paved and wild. Its themes aren't easy to summarize and its questions defy easy answers.

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