Whenever a rock star dies young – and particularly in as sad and violent a manner as Kurt Cobain did – the conspiracy theorists, drama vampires and all-round clag magnets come crawling out of the woodwork.
The notion that Cobain was murdered – with the finger pointed firmly at his widow – has been around since before Nick Broomfield made his documentary Kurt & Courtney in 1998.
In Soaked In Bleach, Tom Grant, the PI hired by Courtney Love when Cobain went missing, raids his personal collection of recorded phone calls and puts across his assertions of foul play. The use of shabby dramatic re-enactments gives it all a distinct whiff of Channel 5 barrel-scraping, with Love painted as a negligee-clad panto villain.
And while it does raise several pertinent questions about what actually happened on April 5, 1994, this is more a film for casual ambulance chasers than for anyone with an interest in Cobain’s music.
