Tom Cruise might play a still-living Kurt Cobain in A Star Is Born remake

The character wouldn't be called Kurt Cobain, mind you, but screenwriter Will Fetters has revealed that the male lead of the Beyonce-starring, Clint Eastwood-directed remake of A Star Is Born is basically Kurt Cobain, if he hadn't killed himself. The story, which has been put to film three times before, tells the story of an up-and-coming singer, most recently played by Barbra Streisand, whose career gets a boost when she starts dating an established star. For Fetters, though, the entire reason he got involved with the project was to bring the Cobain aspect to the script:

I wanted to do A Star is Born because I’m a huge Kurt Cobain fan. That was like my Kennedy assassination when I was a teenager. When he died it was a huge horrible thing. So I approached A Star is Born, for me the framework was all right, if Kurt Cobain never got to go Unplugged and survived and it’s 20 years later and it’s now, and he wanted to try to do that album with that understanding as this grunge icon. That’d be tough to get done if he was past his prime, no longer selling, how does he get that album?

While you could make the case that a still-living Cobain might be relevant — heck, Dave Grohl just won a whole bunch of Grammys — I don't think that the Nirvana frontman makes such a bad choice for inspiration. (As long as Fetters doesn't get too painfully obvious about it. Let's not feature a Courtney Love analog, shall we?) If the story calls for someone whose career was flourishing back in the '90s, we should just be happy that it's not A.J. from the Backstreet Boys.

Of course, this is also the role that Tom Cruise is currently circling, which kind of undoes most of what I just said — if I can't buy cheeseball Tom Cruise in the cheeseball wig of a cheeseball '80s rocker, somehow I doubt I'll be able to swallow him singing "In Bloom," or the nearest royalty-free approximation. And let's not even get into the question of why a former grunge god would take on a future R&B superstar as his protégé. (Because, let's be honest, Beyonce only ever plays Beyonce.) Basically: this version of A Star Is Born is shaping up to be much, much weirder than we could have imagined.