BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG | I've always felt about Kurt Cobain roughly the way Public Enemy feels about Elvis Presley. My heart was always with Courtney Love. Her searing rage burned through me in a way that Cobain's banal alienation never did. I can't think of a truer line in rock 'n' roll than "I want to be the girl with the most cake." And now she is. She's Miss World, a Versace-wearing movie star whose remade mug peers out from the pages of slick rags like Harper's Bazaar. So even after watching Nick Broomfield's scandalous new documentary, "Kurt and Courtney," which paints Love as a pathologically violent shrew at best and a murderer at worst, I'm still glad that she's got rings on her fingers and millions in the bank and the credit in the straight world that she's always secretly coveted.

"Kurt and Courtney" is premiering at San Francisco's Roxie Cinema next week, though Broomfield doesn't know yet when it will get to the rest of the country. It was yanked from Sundance after Love's lawyers complained that Broomfield didn't have permission to use two songs in the film, one by Nirvana and one by Hole. Broomfield offered to cut the songs, but Sundance didn't relent. Even Slamdance, the largest Sundance alternative, refused it. Eventually, "Kurt and Courtney" was screened at Slamdunk, one of the alternative alternative festivals. But Love had been trying to squelch the film long before it got to Utah. Goaded by her lawyers, MTV pressured some of Broomfield's backers to bow out of the project, leaving the BBC and Broomfield's company, Strength Ltd., to cover all the costs.

Broomfield seems an unlikely enemy for Love. He has made his career with sympathetic documentaries about dangerous women -- his most famous films are "Hollywood Madam," about Heidi Fleiss; "Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer," about the Florida woman hyped as the first female serial murderer; and "Fetishes," about a group of Manhattan dominatrixes. "I set out really wanting to like her and understand her," Broomfield told Salon after a screening on Monday. But Love is notoriously vicious to journalists, and Broomfield has returned the favor: The second half of "Kurt and Courtney" is a scathing attack on Love, full of people talking about her brawls with writers and with other rock stars, excerpts from death threats left on reporters' answering machines and a host of assertions, including many by her father, Hank Harrison, that Cobain was murdered and that Love was behind it.

"Kurt and Courtney" opens with a crime-scene photo of Cobain's leg, his body obscured by a doorway. We hear about his precocious love of music from his saintly aunt Mary, the film's most sympathetic character and the woman who gave Cobain his first guitar and recorded his first songs. What follows is a parade of friends lionizing Kurt as gentle and sensitive and trashing Courtney as a "harpy" and a gold-digger. For Broomfield, Kurt was an artistic genius and Love was a manipulative poseur. "My starting point for the film was Kurt and the fact that he will endure as a great artist. I think he will rank along with Hendrix and Lennon as a great musical influence," Broomfield says. "Courtney attracts an enormous amount of attention and everyone has a point of view about her, but as an artist, I think the jury's still out."

"Kurt and Courtney" includes interviews with Tom Grant, a private investigator obsessed with proving that Love killed Cobain, and "El Duce," a rotund lecher who wears an executioner's mask when singing with his band, the Mentors, and who says that Love offered him 50 grand to "whack Kurt Cobain." By some sleazy convergence, the man who brings Broomfield to El Duce's decrepit Southern California ranch is also Divine Brown's pimp.

By including so many people who hate Love, however, Broomfield actually creates sympathy for her. Even her most egregious behavior is understandable in light of her father, a sweaty, potato-faced monster whose idea of "tough love" was using pit bulls to scare his teenage daughter. Harrison has written a book called "Who Killed Kurt Cobain?" that implicates Love, and he seems put out that there isn't more public interest in his assaults on her. "It's a great war and I hope the public watches it," he says. "Why isn't our feud as interesting as the Hatfields and the McCoys?" Later, when asked what message he wants to send his daughter, he barks, "I've got her number. I got her nailed. I'm still the father, period. I don't care if you've got $177 million, I'll kick your ass. If you want to cop to me, maybe we can work something out. But until then, I'll keep kicking your ass."

Harrison's book contains a poem that Love wrote when she was a teenager that he salvaged from the garbage. Called "Future Date," it burns with Love's obsessive ambition. Given her horrific childhood, the poem's rage for fame seems as poignant as it does ruthless. "I think that poem is probably who she is. That's where her soul is at," says Broomfield.

N E X T+P A G E+| "She thought the only way she could achieve stardom was through a man."