PARK CITY, Utah — “The most transgressive thing you can do in the world is be a female aging in public,” Courtney Love says in one of the most striking lines of “Antiheroine,” an intimate documentary in which the 61-year-old rock musician reflects on her relationship with Kurt Cobain, and the highs and tragedies of her life, as she writes her first new album in well over a decade.
A rowdy and supportive crowd filled the biggest theater Tuesday night at the Sundance Film Festival, eager for a chance to catch up with the former front woman of Hole, who’s been (mostly) out of the public eye since she moved to London in 2019 — just her and Bell, her beloved Pomeranian — when she was two-and-a-half months sober.
Much to the audience’s disappointment, though, Love couldn’t be there. The festival instead shot a video of the applauding crowd to send her.
The Courtney Love who invites directors Edward Lovelace and James Hall into her art-filled Edwardian home is just as funny and unfiltered as you remember, reflecting on how everyone has a story or a complaint about her: “She stole my grandmother’s wedding ring. She ate my muesli. I’m not even kidding!”
R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe, who says he’d do anything for Love and is helping out with her new album, along with Echo & the Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant, describes her as “one of those people like Patti Smith, who from time to time just has to kick in a window.”
Most rock comeback documentaries might include footage of their subject getting back onstage in front of an adoring crowd. But what Lovelace and Hall have shot for their 98-minute film is smaller and far more personal. We see Love, a practitioner of Buddhist chanting, in her bedroom, on her back patio among her rose bushes, or even getting contemplative in a bathtub.
This isn’t a film about someone returning to fame, but about an artist, who, having hit rock bottom, is just trying to find her voice again and move on to her next chapter.
“I’m a f—ing household name who’s stuck in 1994!” she says at one point.
That’s the year Cobain, her husband and the front man of Nirvana, arguably the biggest band on the planet at the time, died by suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in their Seattle home. Their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was just 20 months old.
Even if you lived through the ’90s, it’s shocking to be reminded of the timeline of events. Hole’s acclaimed second outing, “Live Through This” — a beloved album that’s found generations of fans — came out a week later. And rather than take time off, Love just powered through. Looking back, she says in the film, she was running away from grief, but it came out in all kinds of ways. Heavy drug use. Being belligerent with fans. Disrespecting her band.
And this was happening as she was being vilified worldwide by Nirvana fans who wanted to blame her for Cobain’s death. Some theorized that she’d murdered him to get his money. Someone put shotgun shells on the stage at a Hole concert. The film shows Love diving off the stage to crowd surf and people ripping off her clothes as security has to shove them away to rescue her.
Her stint in Hollywood after that, in which she established herself as a mainstream actress with celebrated performances in “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Man in the Moon,” is described by a friend as part of her pattern as a drug addict. Just this time she was addicted to fame.
Hole was a pioneering angry, raw, unapologetic feminist band, and Love’s relationship with Cobain had skyrocketed her to stardom as part of the “it” couple of the grunge era. They got together when Hole went on tour with Nirvana, she says in the film, after “flirting for a year” and bonding over “being rejected by our fathers.” (Hers was “a lowlife” who had custody removed for allegedly dosing her with LSD when she was 4.)
“When you find somebody you really get along with and can be yourself with, it’s easy,” Love says in the film.
“We knew we were in love, we knew we wanted to have a baby right away,” she continues. “The thing that got in the way was his need for total oblivion” — even though they both were addicted to heroin.
Looking back, Love says, their biggest tensions came from being on different trajectories. She was still hungry for respect and fame, and he wanted to retreat from it all — leading him to accuse her of abandoning him amid his spiraling drug use.
The night he died, she says, getting emotional, he tried to call her at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, while she was in Los Angeles for rehab, but the front desk didn’t put the late-night call through.
One shot shows the words she scrawled in giant red letters across her diary: “I can’t grow a new heart.”
Though gentle with its subject, “Antiheroine” isn’t a vanity film that Love commissioned. Producer Julia Nottingham said in the screening Q&A that, while working on a documentary about Pamela Anderson in January 2022, the crew was constantly talking about Love as another misunderstood famous woman from the ’80s and ’90s who’d been shaped by a specific narrative and hadn’t really gotten to tell her full story. So, Nottingham cold-emailed Love’s manager, who, shockingly, wrote her back and asked to meet. That’s when she learned that Love was finally working on new music.
She thought of Lovelace and Hall (known for their immersive, character-driven documentary style) and sent them over to meet and film Love at her house. Six or seven hours later no one had called her. “I thought, it’s either gone really well, or she’s kidnapped them,” Nottingham said. “And then she called me and she was like, ‘Julia, oh my God, you found the British Maysles brothers!’”
Lovelace said that their technique is to just give subjects space to take the conversation where they want to go, which usually leads to them going deeper than they do in other interviews.
It also may account for why there’s so little specificity about Love’s relationship with her daughter, who in 2009, at 17, asked to be emancipated and filed a restraining order against her mother for her drug use and alleging she caused the death of two family pets because of “hoarding” and “addiction.” Frances’s absence is noticeable, as is the fact that it’s never addressed.
Love shows Frances’s baby photos and says that the emancipation happened during the fallout from her drug relapse because “Frances couldn’t take it anymore.” But she doesn’t speak about their relationship much except to joke that she’s got to write the album “before I shuffle off this mortal coil and end up living on my daughter’s lap.” She also mentions that she’s going to see her grandson.
Eventually, Love trusted the directors enough to bring them into her writing process, which involved her looking through her diaries and photos of Cobain, a process she describes as “pretty … hard.”
Crying in a karaoke room, she sings Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” saying it’s the first time she’s sung anything of his, period.
“No one’s going to listen to me without music,” she says, which may be an oblique reference to her long-awaited memoir, “The Girl with the Most Cake,” which she’d announced she’d finished with a ghostwriter in 2022. But it still hasn’t been published. Does she think she needs to make a new album before people will read the book? That follow-up question is never asked.
Hall said in the Q&A that Love told them several times, “I’m writing this record just for me. I’m not writing this record out of necessity, because I have go back on tour. It’s just this record is everything to me.”
The movie’s most revealing footage comes from watching Love try to sing. Her voice is shot. While singing a Hole song at karaoke, she can’t hit the screaming high notes she used to perform night after night.
In the studio, trying to record a song titled “Blood From a Stone” that she wrote about Frances, she’s a ball of nerves, constantly doubting if the takes are good and asking to start over.
The progress, quite honestly, does not sound good. But the film ends with a lovely reunion with Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur and the triumphant playback of the song, which sounds like classic Hole.
No word on when the album is coming out, and the movie still needs distribution. But if this is a story about a person rebuilding their confidence, the good news is that on those last days in the studio, Hall said, “she said she had never felt better.”
“There’s no logic that this woman is alive,” Auf der Maur says in the film, joyously. “She should be dead 25 times.”
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