A new documentary about the gen X icon and “queen of grunge” Courtney Love caused a stir at the Sundance film festival – without the legendary Hole frontwoman in attendance.

The musician and actor, now 61, was supposed to attend the premiere of Antiheroine, a new retrospective documentary by Edward Lovelace and James Hall that traces her storied life and career, but did not make it for undisclosed reasons. “We’re really gutted that Courtney couldn’t make it tonight to celebrate this moment with us all,” said Lovelace in his introduction for the film’s premiere in Park City, Utah, calling Love “so unfiltered, so truthful”.

“But we just wanted to say it’s been the greatest of privileges to be invited into Courtney’s personal space to make such an intimate, honest film with someone we have so much love for,” he added, thanking Love “for trusting us to – alongside her – tell her story and allowing us to experience the last three years”.

The 98-minute film finds Love at her home in London, where she relocated more than five years ago for a quieter, more grounded life. “I was two and a half years sober,” she says in the film. “I came over here with a winter wardrobe and a dog. I, like, removed myself from everybody. What I didn’t have was anything rational or grounded.” Antiheroine finds Love writing music again after two unsuccessful albums and more than a decade away from the spotlight, grappling with ageing, her volatile past in the spotlight and her abrasive reputation – “I didn’t think about likability ever,” she says in voiceover at the start of the film. “Likability was not a factor.”

But Love magnetized fans with “an unfiltered, insanely honest aspect”, says the REM frontman Michael Stipe, a close friend of Love’s who appears in the film along with musicians Melissa Auf der Maur, Eric Erlandson, Billie Joe Armstrong, Patty Schemel and Butch Walker.

In Antiheroine, that reputation comes in for a reckoning. “Everyone has a Courtney Love story,” she says ruefully while welcoming the film-makers 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 would be her first in 15 years, represented “a way to take back my story”, she says. “No one can tell my story but me.”

Within footage of Love’s emotional return to the studio and musings on her personal archive – including journal entries, song lyrics and home video – Antiheroine retraces Love’s pioneering and polarizing career as a rock frontwoman. By her own admission, her itinerant and unstable youth forged an intense desire for fame. Born Courtney Michelle Harrison in 1964 to a “countercultural family” in San Francisco, Love developed a “rhino skin” at an early age. She claims her father, Hank Harrison, gave her LSD when she was four, and subsequently lost custody of her. She had her first drink at age 10, claiming that her stepfather, David, “got me very drunk”, leaving her “physically ill for a week”. Her mother, Linda Carroll, according to Love, scapegoated her young daughter for her problems. “When you have a narcissistic parent, you’ll never be good enough,” Love says.

After her mother moved overseas, a rebellious Love spent time in foster care and juvenile hall. She credits Patti Smith with saving her life, by showing her what a woman in rock could be. Determined to become a rock star, she moved to Liverpool, England, to infiltrate the city’s punk scene, though she insists she was not a groupie. “I didn’t want to fuck those guys, I wanted to be those guys,” she recalls.

Liverpool led to Los Angeles, where she worked as a stripper and performed as the lead singer of an otherwise all-male punk band, whose members, she says, turned on her. Love then placed an ad in the paper for female musicians. (Erlandson, Hole’s longtime guitarist, answered anyway.) She recalls her naked ambition trying to make it in the LA music scene of the 1980s – sharing a studio with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, dieting, limiting herself to heroin twice a month, developing her signature scream, practicing six to seven days a week, turning a terrifying experience in which she was handcuffed and nearly raped into the song Retard Girl. With Hole, she says, “I had a place for my too much-ness.”

“I never doubted that I would be famous,” Love says, “I just thought it would solve everything.”

Antiheroine also delves into her much-publicized and tumultuous romance with the Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, to whom she was immediately attracted. “He was so beautiful,” she recalls, re-examining notes and lyrics they wrote together in bed. “He had a really weird sense of humor. We were two designated scapegoats, rejected by our mothers and our fathers. We found each other and we were home. It was really instant. That honeymoon phase of it went on for what felt like a really long time because it was so rich.”

Love and Cobain married in 1992, and welcomed daughter Frances Bean Cobain in August of that year. (Frances does not participate in the film.) Antiheroine recalls the media brouhaha around their relationship and particularly a Vanity Fair article that suggested she used heroin while pregnant with her daughter, a charge Love still vigorously denies. Heroin figures prominently in the film, as does intense media backlash, particularly after Cobain’s suicide in April 1994. The same week Cobain died, Hole’s acclaimed second album Live Through This was released, and the band went on tour. “The grieving process was live,” recalls Erlandson. The film includes numerous clips of fans and pundits speculating that Love was responsible for Cobain’s death; at one Hole concert, an attender placed shotgun shells on the stage in front of her, precipitating a public breakdown.

“She’s been pilloried again and again,” Stipe says in the film. While some was deserved – Love could be abrasive – “quite often, it was not”. Thirty years later, Love still appears emotional over both her bond with Cobain, even singing some Nirvana karaoke, and the inescapable tumult that followed his death. “Kurt Cobain walks into the fucking room before Courtney does,” she says in the film. “That’s just going to be my life.”

After a pivot to film, including a critically acclaimed performance in Miloš Forman’s The People vs Larry Flynt, Love released, with Hole, the 1999 album Celebrity Skin, which pivoted toward a mainstream sound. But the success was short-lived, as the demons caught up with her. Love disbanded Hole in the middle of a tour. Her actions became more erratic, and her drug use escalated. “If you want to nuke your life, do crack,” a now sober Love quips. As a teenager, Frances Bean sought legal emancipation from her mother. “I certainly was not the easiest mother, that’s the truth,” Love concedes. “I couldn’t focus on her at all.”

Love remains mum on the state of their relationship in the present, though by film’s end she’s off to visit her grandson, whom Frances Bean shares with husband Riley Hawk, in Los Angeles. The final song she composed for her forthcoming new album is about Frances.

That album still does not have a release date or a title but, according to the film, will feature collaboration from erstwhile bandmate Auf der Maur and Stipe. “I think it’s a lesson of ‘don’t do it until you’re called’,” she says of her new work. “You can call it ‘the recovery record’ or ‘the fucking almost died record’ or ‘the got granted a lease on life record’. I got to remain alive.”

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

• Antiheroine is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution