Courtney Love’s ‘Antiheroine’ premieres at Sundance as a corrective to decades of media mythology
Courtney Love’s long-awaited documentary Antiheroine has made its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival – even if its subject wasn’t there to see it.
Directed by Edward Lovelace and James Hall, the 98-minute film debuted on January 27 in Park City, Utah, drawing a packed audience and an outpouring of affection for Love, who was notably absent from the screening.
Festival director Eugene Hernandez and the filmmakers later described the room as “gutted” by her absence, though firmly supportive, sharing footage of the crowd chanting “We love you, Courtney!” to send back to her.
Antiheroine positions itself as a deliberate step away from the tabloid caricature that has followed Love since the 1990s.
Rather than rehashing scandal, the film allows her to reclaim her own narrative — one shaped by survival, creativity and confrontation.
Much of the documentary is set in London, where Love has lived quietly for more than five years.
Here, she’s presented sober, reflective and creatively re-energised, working on new music and reassessing a life that has often been filtered through other people’s projections.
The film traces her turbulent childhood, the “rhino skin” she says she developed early on, her rise with Hole, and her later success as a Golden Globe-nominated actor.
Inevitably, Antiheroine revisits her relationship with Kurt Cobain — described in the film as “love at first sound” — while also interrogating the intense media scrutiny that followed his death.
Love speaks candidly about becoming a “designated scapegoat”, a role she argues was engineered by a culture eager to vilify outspoken women.
Produced by Julia Nottingham (Pamela: A Love Story), the film has already been framed by critics as part of a wider re-evaluation of how the media historically treated high-profile women, aligning it with recent documentaries on Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears.
The premiere was attended by a roster of peers and collaborators, including Michael Stipe, Billie Joe Armstrong, Melissa Auf der Maur and Eric Erlandson.
Love’s absence went unexplained, but her presence looms large throughout the film.
Looking forward, Antiheroine heavily teases Love’s first solo album in 15 years – which she describes as a way of “taking back my story” – alongside a recent collaboration with Stipe that she calls “gorgeous”.
The documentary is currently seeking distribution, with a streaming release expected later this year.
If Antiheroine succeeds in its aim, it may finally recalibrate how Courtney Love is remembered – not as a myth, villain or cautionary tale, but as an artist who outlived the narrative written for her.
