Kurt & Courtney, Broomfield's new film, fails miserably as in-depth reporting, but it works as a creepy meditation on access and the role that the media play in doling out credibility and celebrity. Turning away from criminals and deviates--at least at the outset--Broomfield chooses to chronicle the stormy relationship of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. He never tells us why, or what he hopes to find; he evinces no interest at all in their music beyond using it on the soundtrack. Instead, he journeys to the Pacific Northwest and begins interviewing anyone with a tenuous connection to the late Nirvana frontman--his down-to-earth Aunt Mary, his former friends, who watched him grow more remote and isolated.

After a hair-raising interview with Hank Harrison, Love's father, a jowly opportunist who all but accuses his daughter of killing her husband, Broomfield decides to see how crazy the possibility is. At this point, his financial backers start to feel pressure from MTV and other "concerned parties" to drop the project. Broomfield learns that Love controls Nirvana's music and won't let him use it; in its place, he's forced to use the wanky noodling of Cobain's best friend's band. In absentia, Cobain becomes a spectral, contradictory presence, a courteous near-saint who's nonetheless capable of threatening a contract hit on a reporter.

The more channels of access Love closes, the more Broomfield is forced to find bizarre alternatives--stalkerazzi, Love's embittered glam-rocker ex-boyfriend, even The Mentors' notorious frontman El Duce, a burly lunatic with Ping-Pong ball eyes who claims point-blank that Courtney offered him $50,000 to whack Mr. Nevermind. (Luckily for the sake of conspiracy cred, El Duce was fatally smushed by a train a week after the interview.) The movie reaches a peak of bizarro-world irony at an ACLU fundraiser, where the infamous reporter-threatener Love is the guest of honor--and Broomfield gets bounced for defending his freedom of speech.

The portrait of Love that emerges--which feeds into Broomfield's own obsessions with received celebrity and second-hand fame--is of a kinderwhore Eve Harrington, a remora who leeched off the fame of a larger host. But how much better is the director, who got his funding on the strength of Love's notoriety, and who then turns his camera over to these crackpots out of necessity? Not a whole lot, which makes Broomfield's work both fascinating and repellent. Broomfield strips celebrity, and reporting, down to naked transactions of access and money.

Unfortunately, after a while, he has nothing to offer but his lack of entry to Courtney Love. Insights into Kurt and Courtney's relationship are few and far between, and he brushes their talent aside so dismissively that you wonder why he even bothered to take the assignment. The movie is worth seeing for its bursts of rancorous humor and its window onto a fetid ecosystem of celebrity saprophytes. Beyond that, Kurt & Courtney smells like something much more dubious than teen spirit.