‘If you want to nuke your life, go for it’: Courtney Love’s raw documentary arrives at Sundance | Sundance 2026

A new documentary about Generation

The musician and actress, 61, was supposed to attend the premiere of Antiheroine, a new retrospective documentary by Edward Lovelace and James Hall that traces her life and career, but was unable to attend for undisclosed reasons. “We are so sad that Courtney couldn’t be here tonight to celebrate this moment with all of us,” Lovelace said in her introduction to the film’s premiere in Park City, Utah, describing the love as “unfiltered and so honest.”

“But we just wanted to say that it was one of the greatest privileges to be invited into Courtney’s personal space to make such an intimate and honest film with someone we love so dearly,” he added, thanking Love “for trusting us — along with her — to tell her story and allowing us to experience the past three years.”

The 98-minute film finds Love in her home in London, where she moved more than five years ago to live a quieter, more settled life. “I’ve been sober for two and a half years,” she says in the film. “I came here with a winter wardrobe and a dog. I distanced myself from everyone. What I didn’t have was anything rational or grounded.” Antiheroine finds love writing music again after two unsuccessful albums and out of the spotlight for more than a decade, as she grapples with aging, her checkered past in the spotlight, and her abrasive reputation — “I never thought about like,” she says in voiceover at the beginning of the film. “Gravity was not a factor.”

But Love attracted fans with “an insanely honest, unfiltered side,” says REM singer Michael Stipe, a close friend of Love’s who appears in the film with musicians Melissa Auf der Maur, Erik Erlandsson, Billie Joe Armstrong, Patti Schimel and Butch Walker.

In Antiheroine, that reputation comes into play. “Everyone has a love story with Courtney,” she says wistfully as she welcomes the filmmakers to her London apartment. (As of March 2025, Love was in the process of obtaining UK citizenship, as things were “scary” in the US.) The new album, which will be her first in 15 years, represents “a way to reclaim my story,” she says. “No one can tell my story but me.”

Within footage of Love’s emotional return to the studio and her reflections on her personal archive—including diary entries, song lyrics, and a home video—Antiheroine traces Love’s pioneering and polarizing career as a rock pioneer. By her own admission, her itinerant and restless youth created a strong desire for fame. Born Courtney Michelle Harrison in 1964 into a “counterculture family” in San Francisco, Love developed “unicorn skin” at an early age. She claims her father, Hank Harrison, gave her LSD when she was four years old and then lost custody of her. She had her first drink at the age of 10, claiming that her stepfather, David, “made me very drunk”, which left her “physically ill for a week”. Her mother, Linda Carroll, according to Love, made her young daughter a scapegoat for her problems. “When you have a narcissistic parent, you’re never good enough,” Love says.

After her mother moved abroad, Rebellious Love spent time in foster care and juvenile hall. She credits Patti Smith with saving her life by showing her what women in rock music can be. Determined to become a rock star, she moved to Liverpool, England, to infiltrate the city’s punk scene, although she insisted she was not a groupie. “I didn’t want to fuck these guys; He is You remember these guys.

It led Liverpool to Los Angeles, where she worked as a stripper and performed as lead singer in an all-male punk band, whose members she says turned on her. Love then placed an ad in the newspaper for female musicians. (Erlandson, Hole’s longtime guitarist, answered, anyway.) She recalls her explicit ambition of trying to make it in the Los Angeles music scene in the 1980s — sharing a studio with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, dieting, cutting back on heroin twice a month, developing her signature scream, rehearsing six to seven days a week, and turning a terrifying experience in which she was handcuffed and nearly raped into “Retard Girl.” “With Hall, I had room to exaggerate,” she says.

“I never doubted that I would become famous,” Love says. “I thought that would solve everything.”

Antiheroine also delves into her highly publicized and turbulent romance with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, to whom she was immediately drawn. “It was so beautiful,” she recalls, re-examining the notes and lyrics they wrote together in bed. “He had a really weird sense of humor. We were definite scapegoats, rejected by our mothers and fathers. We found each other and were home. It was a real moment. That honeymoon phase lasted a very long time because it was so rich.”

Love and Cobain married in 1992, and gave birth to their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, in August of that year. (Frances is not involved in the film.) Antiheroine remembers the media buzz around their relationship and especially the Vanity Fair article that suggested she used heroin while pregnant with her daughter, a charge Love still vehemently denies. Heroin features prominently in the film, as does the intense media reaction, especially after Cobain’s suicide in April 1994. The same week that Cobain died, Hole’s acclaimed second album Live Through This was released, and the band went on tour. “The grieving process was vivid,” Erlandson recalls. The film includes numerous clips of fans and critics speculating that Love was responsible for Cobain’s death; At one of Hall’s concerts, an attendee placed shotgun shells on the stage in front of her, leading to a general meltdown.

“I was made fun of over and over again,” Stipe says in the film. And while some deserved it — love can be tough — “a lot of times, it wasn’t.” Thirty years later, Love still seems sentimental over her connection to Cobain, even singing some Nirvana karaoke songs, and the inevitable turmoil that followed his death. “Kurt Cobain walks into the room before Courtney does,” she says in the film. “This is just going to be my life.”

After turning to film, including a critically acclaimed performance in Miloš Forman’s The People vs Larry Flynt, Love, with Hole, released the 1999 album Celebrity Skin, which pivoted toward a mainstream sound. But the success did not last long, as the demons caught up with her. The Love Pit disbanded midway through the round. Her behavior became erratic, and her drug use escalated. “If you want to nuke your life, go for it,” said the now sober Love. As a teenager, Frances Penn sought legal emancipation from her mother. “I definitely wasn’t the easiest mother, that’s the truth,” Love admits. “I couldn’t focus on it at all.”

Love remains mum about the status of their relationship in the present, although at the end of the film she is on her way to visit her grandson, whom Frances Bean shares with her husband, Riley Hawke, in Los Angeles. The last song she wrote for her upcoming new album is about Frances.

This album still has no release date or title, but according to the film, it will feature collaborations from former bandmate Auf der Maur and Stipe. “I think it’s the lesson of ‘Don’t do it until you’re called,’” she says of her new work. “You could call it ‘The Redemption Record’ or ‘The Almost Dying Record’ or ‘A Lease Given to the Life Record.’ I have to stay alive.”

Throughout Antiheroine, love returns time and again to the music – as a release valve, an escape, a balm. “The more I write these songs, the further and further away I get from bullshit,” she says. “One song can change everything. If I don’t believe in it, I don’t believe in anything.”