Remember that kind of cutesy Hugh Grant movie About a Boy? I remember it mostly because I bailed out of our annual family reunion a few hours early to see it with my then-boyfriend. Toni Collette and the kid in it, Nicholas Hoult, made it worth seeing, of course, and Natalia Tena, now Tonks of Harry Potter fame, is always fun to watch, but they sort of mutilated some of the movie from the book (as many movies are wont to do, of course).

The part I really wanted to touch on was the music of the book. Instead of focusing on Kurt Cobain, his death, and the way it affected Tena’s character so dramatically in the book, the film instead chose to have the kids interested in crap—oops, I mean rap—music instead. (Not all rap music is crap; but the music in the film versus Cobain’s songs was like Barney versus Jimmy Page.)

In the book, author Nick Hornby eloquently penned a scene where, upon hearing of Cobain’s suicide, Ellie has a breakdown—one of the most intense and pivotal scenes. Indeed, Ellie’s insistence on wearing a Kurt Cobain jumper at school, her obsession with Nirvana (and Marcus’s subsequent interest), and Cobain’s death are all pretty important in the book—seeing as the title of the book is a play on the Nirvana song, “About a Girl”!

You have to wonder why the screenplay was instead handled with kid gloves. Was it the drug use? The suicide? Because they had no problem dealing with Marcus’s mother’s suicide (which was actually done rather brilliantly between the two of them on screen, I thought). By omitting Cobain’s strong presence within the novel, the film did both the audience as well as the singer a disservice.