It is hard to tell whether or not Kurt Cobain would have enjoyed Brett Morgen’s new documentary about him, one that scribbles his most revealing journal entries onto a big screen and digs into the deepest, darkest parts of his artistic temperament. Cobain was highly suspicious of journalists and didn’t like to explain the songs he wrote. He preferred letting the listener provide his or her own meaning to the music.

Regardless of what the Nirvana frontman may have thought of this raw, revealing documentary, airing on HBO May 4 after a brief stint in theaters, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is one of the most riveting rock biographies ever made. Cobain considered himself an “acne superstar,” and Morgen’s film highlights both parts of that, from his adolescent as a bored, lonely manic-depressive to the dizzying, if sordid heights of fame that followed Nevermind’s bounce to the top of the Billboard charts.