Metacritic reviews

Everyone involved with the film brings their top talents to the fore, and the result is a touching, heartbreaking and an ultimately honest personal experience.

Filmmaker AJ Schnack's hauntingly beautiful film is a bold and successful attempt to recover the human being who disappeared under the heavy mantle of "face and voice of a lost generation," and whose life has been increasingly overshadowed by his sensational early death in 1994.

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.

About a Son is essentially a dead rock star talking about his life for an hour and a half, and—here, jacket-blurbers!—it's deeply moving.

About A Son may not let in anybody who doesn't already have one foot in Nirvana's doorway, but those people are invited in fully, to experience the contradictions and preoccupations of a man whose music defined his era.

Be advised that this is no ordinary music doc. There are no talking heads and no performance footage of Nirvana. In fact, there's no Nirvana music at all. Instead, Schnack gives us other artists' music that had an effect on the troubled rocker.

Some fans will find the approach (which avoids Nirvana music and perf footage) too arty and indirect; but others will welcome the specialized theatrical release and the subsequent DVD.

A true gift to fans of this important musician.

There's nothing particularly revelatory about the interviews recorded over a two-month span, but there's an intimate quality that gives the impression you're listening to a private conversation, which, in a sense, you are.

It’s hard to know who the audience might be for the documentary oddity Kurt Cobain About a Son, but I bet its subject, the guy who’s still being called on to entertain us even after his death, would have hated it.