Before you go casting off Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck as yet another look into the life of one of rock’s legends, be aware that Brett Morgen’s documentary has something that distinguishes itself from other rock docs about Cobain: the full support and cooperation from Cobain’s family, along with Courtney Love, who gave Morgen access to everything she had on her late husband. The film weaves in drawings from Cobain’s own notebook, personal recordings, unreleased music, and home videos, along with plenty of other previously unseen material. Needless to say, Nirvana fans will be hard pressed to find a more definitive portrait of their fallen idol.

But Morgen’s documentary thankfully doesn’t turn into hagiography. Sure, it can be indulgent, like when it dedicates much of its 2+ hour runtime to animations of Cobain’s notebook drawings, but Morgen prefers to focus on demystifying much of Cobain’s reputation over the years since his suicide. It’s inherently fascinating material, but Morgen’s attempt to delve deep into Cobain’s life doesn’t prove to be especially illuminating. By the end, Cobain doesn’t really feel any less enigmatic, and the documentary only shows how it might never be possible to get a sense of who Cobain truly was. That feeling, or lack of feeling, ends up underlining the tragedy of Cobain’s death, as we’ll presumably never get to know much more than what Montage of Heck highlights (although the absence of Dave Grohl and Frances Bean Cobain in the doc echo throughout). Cobain will always remain mysterious to some degree, but Montage of Heck more than holds its own as a fitting tribute to his life and career.

“In 1999, Tower Records made over one billion dollars. Five years later, they filed for bankruptcy.” That statement opens All Things Must Pass, Colin Hanks’ documentary about the famous chain of record stores that crashed and burned after the end of the 20^th century. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Tower Records could no longer sustain their worldwide operation (hint: rhymes with “schminternet”), and Hanks thankfully doesn’t dwell on stating the obvious impact MP3s had on physical media. Hanks also avoids turning his film into a eulogy for the days when shopping for music was a more communal experience, keeping things relatively straightforward as a rise and fall story about Tower Records. It’s a simple, entertaining documentary, one that prefers to sit back and let its entertaining subjects guide the film.

Starting back in the 1960’s, Hanks lets Tower Records founder Russ Solomon detail the meteoric rise of his company from a tiny record shop in Sacramento to one of the world’s biggest music stores. Hanks frames this section through the eccentric types who ran Tower Records, charting their rise from store clerks in the ’60s to VPs and Managers of a billion-dollar business decades later. Those kinds of success stories are inherently fascinating to learn about, and the close-knit, family-like nature of Tower Records leads to a variety of great anecdotes (one example: the company’s successful expansion into Japan started with a drunken conversation between Solomon and a receiving clerk).

And yet, despite a tumultuous fall from grace, no one interviewed by Hanks seems to hold any animosity over what happened with each other (most hatred seems directed towards the banks, who forced a restructuring and, arguably, kicked the downfall into motion). Everyone at Tower fondly reminisces the fun times they had, but they all have an awareness that it could never have lasted forever. The only misstep from Hanks with this message comes at the very end, as a trip to Japan—where Tower Records still thrives—feels too congratulatory and unnecessary, falling into a nostalgia trap the film avoided up to that point. But just like the title says, everything has to come to an end, and All Things Must Pass benefits largely from its progressive attitude. Hanks doesn’t lament the past; he celebrates it, and All Things Must Pass is all the better for it.