Nirvana is one of the best-selling musical acts of all time and one of the most important bands in rock and roll history. From their humble beginnings in Aberdeen, Washington, they went on to conquer the world. The band has sold over 75 million copies of their albums worldwide. Nirvana tragically ended upon the death of lead singer and songwriter Kurt Cobain in April 1994. However, to this day, they are still one of the most popular and respected bands in rock and roll.
Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl were inducted into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. The group has inspired countless musicians to pick up musical instruments for the first time. They’ve left a long-lasting impact on both music and pop culture. Dave Grohl has gone on to great success as the singer-songwriter of the Foo Fighters, who were also inducted into Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2021.
Updated October 12th, 2022: If you love Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve updated this article with additional content and entries.
What may be less known to casual fans, however, are the quality documentaries that have been produced about the band. There have been numerous unauthorized cash-ins that talk about Nirvana, feature films that have characters inspired by the group as Gus Van Sant’s hauntingLast Days, and various documentaries that explore the death of Kurt Cobain — the BBC documentary The Last 48 Hours of Kurt Cobain, Benjamin Statler’s docudrama Soaked in Bleach, and the masterful 1998 British documentary Kurt & Courtney.
None of those projects directly focus on what made people care about Nirvana the most – the music. There are also multiple official Nirvana live concert video releases that do focus on the music, but those are not true movies or documentaries. Therefore, they are excluded from this list. Here are the best Nirvana and Kurt Cobain documentaries, ranked.
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7 Classic Albums: Nirvana – Nevermind
Eagle Rock Entertainment
This episode of the 2005 British documentary series about music, Classic Albums, is a great look at the recording process of Nirvana’s biggest album with interviews with many of the important people who were there to catch history in the making at the time.
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The highlight of Classic Albums: Nirvana – Nevermind is Nevermind producer Butch Vig in the recording studio, isolating specific parts of Nirvana’s classic songs on camera for the first time. This gives fans a chance to hear the high quality of the recordings themselves and hear with new ears how the songs were built and tracked in the studio.
6 Nirvana: In Utero Under Review
MVD
Fans of Nirvana’s third and final studio album, 1993’s In Utero, will be happy to know about the documentary film dealing with this raw and brutally honest masterpiece with the cover art’s iconic angel. Nirvana: In Utero Under Review (2006) paints the picture of the legendary band’s rise and fall, offering insight into Nirvana’s creative process. The documentary consists of interviews with the band and their live and studio performances. It is a vivid documentary about the soul of grunge.
5 Kurt Cobain: About a Son
Balcony Releasing
2006’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son is the honest portrayal of Nirvana’s lead singer told by Cobain himself. This visual essay-style documentary was narrated by Kurt Cobain in his own words, with audio taken from a lengthy interview he gave about his life to author Michael Azerrad for the official Nirvana biography, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Footage for the film was shot in the actual house where the original interview took place.
4 1991: The Year Punk Broke
Tara Films
1991: The Year Punk Broke is an awesome glimpse of the band right around the time the world was first discovering what Nirvana was all about. Very cool live footage of Nirvana in concert can be found here, along with other important bands like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Babes in Toyland, the legendary punk band The Ramones, among others. You can see how much fun the band was having backstage and their live performances often benefited from this.
3 Hype!
Cinepix Film Properties
Filmed in the Seattle scene during the area’s commercial mainstream peak in the early to mid-1990s, Hype! gives viewers a look at the unsung heroes (and underrated bands) of the pacific northwest, alongside their more successful musical counterparts.
While the documentary focuses on many amazing bands besides Nirvana, the first-ever live performance of Nirvana’s biggest hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit is documented here, which by itself makes this movie a must-see for Nirvana fans. For those who are unaware, this is the song that helped put the Seattle music scene on the map for many people and ushered in the so-called Grunge movement to music fans worldwide. There is also a focus on how Nirvanamania changed the local music scene in Seattle as record labels scoured the area for the Next Nirvana.
2 Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Universal Pictures
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is a visually stunning documentary that humanizes Kurt Cobain in a way rarely seen by fans of the band. This is the first and only official film authorized by the estate of Kurt Cobain which attempts to chronicle Kurt’s entire life from his time growing up in Aberdeen to his time as an internationally-acclaimed rock star.
A few liberties were reportedly taken in the telling of Kurt’s story by director Brett Morgen that were disputed after the release of the film. However, the movie has multiple interviews with many key figures in Kurt’s life (minus a few, like Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl) and the film’s soundtrack consists completely of home recordings of early song ideas made by Kurt Cobain himself.
1 Nirvana Live! Tonight! Sold Out!
Geffen Records
Completed shortly after the death of Kurt Cobain, the documentary Nirvana Live! Tonight! Sold Out! was Kurt Cobain’s idea and does its best to honor his memory while documenting Nirvana’s success during their Nevermind tour. You get to see legendary live television performances, interviews, soundbites, and home footage from the band members themselves as they travel around the globe on tour. There’s an impressive amount of Nirvana’s songs on display here and sometimes more than one live performance of a song edited together.
The live performances covered in Nirvana Live! Tonight! Sold Out! give you a sense of what it would have been like to see Nirvana in concert back in the early 90s. Nirvana had great songs and along with many others before them, helped bring the underground alternative rock scene to the mainstream with a mix of pop melodies, punk spirit, and distorted guitars. This documentary is funny, full of musical energy, abstract at times, and sums up why the band was so important to so many people.
