Working for the slimy fly-bynight office park record label from which this picture takes its title, failed disc jockey Martin (Pat Healy) and boisterous huckster Clarence (Kene Holliday) travel around the countryside setting up some seriously awkward and shoddy motel room auditions, promising to produce demo discs for aspiring young singers who hope to become the next big thing, while simultaneously gouging them of their life savings on overhead "studio fees." It's a scam nearly as old as the music business itself, but what's fresh here is [Craig Zobel]'s surprising sympathy for these devils.

[Patrick Kenzie] and his significant other Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan, again relegated to arm candy) are the kind of low-rent gumshoes best employed by collection agents looking for folks who skipped payments on their jet skis. But when a 4-year-old girl is abducted from a neighboring housing project, their associations with Boston's shady underworld provide the kind of leads that cops can't scrape up in such closeted, tribal communities. Kenzie's a modern-day Phillip Marlowe in a dirty tracksuit, armed with street smarts, a foul mouth and one seriously inconvenient moral compass.

The idea is simple: no Nirvana footage, no Nirvana songs and ne Nirvana pictures, at least till the final 30 seconds. Till then, it's just [Kurt Cobain]'s own voice, culled from more than 25 hours of phone interviews done by journo Michael Azerrad. Fans get their trivia (Krist Novoselic never laughed at his jokes), their eerily prophetic slips (his stomach pains made him "want to blow my fuckin' head off") and their strange memories (being broke as he and the band waited for their Geffen contract to kick in). It's a startlingly bold idea, creating an intimacy between audience and subject unheard of in the annals of the hagiographic artist doc.

Motion pictures