Filmmaker Brett Morgen’s tastes are even more catholic than those of Pope Francis. In the past, he has made documentary profiles of the Rolling Stones, U.S military charlatan Oliver North, and Hollywood producer Robert Evans, in 2002’s multiple-award-winning The Kid Stays in the Picture. Then, there are all those flicks about boxing, skiing, and the day (June 17, 1994) O.J. Simpson got arrested.

The last date was just over two months after the leader of Nirvana killed himself. And now Morgen takes on the life that ended in that tragedy in Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. Opening theatrically this Friday (May 15), the film focuses less on the troubled musician’s decline and more on what made him tick in the first place.

“I wanted it to be a completely immersive experience,” says the filmmaker, on the line from his Los Angeles office. With the singer’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, as a producer, Morgen had access to Cobain’s copious notebooks, journals, drawings, and the mix tapes after which the movie is named. “You need to go inside the guy’s head to really get where he was coming from. I didn’t realize until I finished this film that, while Kurt represents a very specific time and place, his music has a kind of timelessness that has made its discovery a kind of rite of passage for the generations that followed.”

In a recent profile, the New York Times called Morgen the “mad scientist” of documentary film, due to the equal time he has so far given to sports, music, show business, and politics, aiming for the places where those things intersect. But there’s nothing uniform in his approach to telling these stories.

“The best part of being a documentary filmmaker is that it provides you with an all-access pass into worlds that otherwise wouldn’t be available to you. Of course, once I’m in, my goal is really to let each story tell itself,” Morgen insists. “The technique has got to match the material, and that depends on what we can dig up. In the end, though, I get an amazing window into each of these worlds.”

Like Heck, you say? His Chicago 10, about the kangaroo-court defendants arrested outside the 1968 Democratic convention, leaned heavily on animated re-creations, and introduced him to computer-graphics wizard Stefan Nadelman, who then worked on this one with Hisko Hulsing, a hand-drawn specialist. The nifty ’toons—themselves in many styles—often accompany home-recorded music that hasn’t been heard before. And all this audio-visual goodness is packed into a two-hour-plus effort made for HBO in the States. Morgen’s previous flick for the adventurous cable network, Crossfire Hurricane(the one about the Stones), never got its run on Canadian TV.

“HBO Canada is a whole different entity,” the filmmaker states, “and I don’t even know how that’s handled. I’m just happy that it works out so that people in Vancouver can get to see this movie the way it’s meant to be seen: on the big screen, with big sound. I watched it on TV for the first time when it was on HBO last night, and I just kept thinking, ‘This thing is way too small for Kurt Cobain!’ ”

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck opens on Saturday (May 16) at the Rio Theatre.