With "Last Days," Portland-based director Gus Van Sant has made a movie only he could, and perhaps should, make. There is a sense of inevitability to the film that registers far beyond its minor-key meditations on fate and fatality. Van Sant's previous work, especially "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," seems to lead directly to this leap of artistic faith. His affinity for society's outcasts and loners, coupled with his distinctly Northwest ethos of fractured individualism and overcast quietude, that finds perfect expression in this daringly intimate story of a death foretold.
A quiet, haunting portrait of a drug-addled rock star hiding out in murky isolation in a decrepit mansion in the woods, "Last Days" moves with a languid yet relentless momentum to its chilling closing shot - a scene that recreates the final act in the life of Kurt Cobain, the Aberdeen-born founder of Nirvana who suicided in 1994 at the age of 27. Van Sant, with a blend of washed-out naturalism and heavy symbolic gesture, captures the miasmic atmosphere of dejection and despair that increasingly trapped Cobain in a cycle of flight and paralysis, as fame and self-destruction chipped away at his all-too-vulnerable psyche.
Van Sant tag-ends his film with a disclaimer stating that, while obviously influenced by the circumstances of Cobain's life, the film is purely a work sprung from his imagination. It's a canny move.
This is no more your typical rock biopic than Nirvana was your typical Top 40 band. There are no flashbacks to formative childhood moments, no complicating backstories or moments of rock-and-roll glory. "Last Days" is a highly impressionistic and idiosyncratic piece of filmmaking that has more in common with Robert Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" than anything else - if one can speak of commonalities at all. It marks perhaps the first time in the history of film that rock and roll has been treated as a serious human subject, with the full weight of tragedy.
The film opens, sans credits, as Blake (played by Michael Pitt) stumbles and mumbles through a dank forest, making his way to a waterfall where he slowly strips to his boxers and Converse All-Stars and plunges in for quick swim. Pitt, his face barely visible behind hanks of greasy, blond hair, gives a strong performance in a role dominated by heroin nods and indecipherable muttering. His features soft and sensuous where Cobain's were wan and angular, he is nonetheless, in his physical performance, a dead ringer for Cobain.
Van Sant's boldest gambit is in how he structures time. Because the film hones down on the 48 hours or so before Blake gives up the ghost, we see him only in the throes of his narcotic degradation, an essentially inarticulate and bumbling shell. There is little from which we can derive sympathy for a shattered genius; he is, in his stupor, just another drug casualty.
Blake's only eloquent moments are musical, the first of which provides the backbone of the film as well as a scene of stunning, almost gutwrenching beauty. The camera spies from outside through a Victorian window into the mansion's practice room, into which Blake wanders like a specter. He flips a switch on an amp and picks up a guitar, strumming a syncopated rhythm shot through with heavy slashes of bar chords, which he puts on an endless, reverberating loop. He grabs another guitar and meshes in another crunching cycle of sound. Then he bangs the drums for a few passes, after which he stands and, reversing the cycle to silence, shuts off all the instruments in sequence.
It is a stunning passage. It is also the most emblematically Nirvana-like moment to come down the pike since Cobain's demise. Within that orchestrated wall of sound is discerned all the talent, all the pain and loneliness of Blake/Cobain's life, and it is here alone one senses the sad enormity of the impending loss. In a film blessedly short on answers, Van Sant drops just the faintest of clues to Blake's hurt: as gorgeous as it is, music is a one-way conversation. Creation occurs in a vacuum, and within that feedback lurks a deafening silence.
It's impossible to dignify suicide. "Last Days" doesn't try to. What Van Sant has achieved with this film is twofold: he at once strips Blake/Cobain's early death of all romantic trappings while at the same time restoring some sense of fate and even, yes, grace to his final gesture. The cast of hangers-on that inhabit Blake's mansion, all but ignoring his state, are a sad comment on the isolation endemic to celebrity, as are the phone calls from demanding agents and record label execs. It is only the brief, tough-love cameo by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, who reasons with Blake not to become a "rock-and-roll cliché," that provides a glimmer of sincere concern in what is otherwise a living hell.
But it's not enough. Too far gone is too far gone.
Nirvana followed up its multi-platinum selling album "Nevermind" - the sling on its catapult to global stardom - with the noisy and challenging "In Utero," an album explicitly made to alienate all the frat-boy jackasses and radio-friendly unit-shifters the band apparently gathered in the wake of its ascent to the big time. Cobain said they wanted to get back to what was real. And there is something very In Utero-ish about "Last Days," as though Van Sant were attempting to reveal the harsh realities that both gave rise to and ultimately ruined Cobain's creative genius. In this sense, this painful, honest film is a love letter, not to Cobain but to his fans - a call to anyone who experienced a deep, abiding sense of loss when that shotgun went off.
It's also Van Sant's most personal film since "Mala Noche," his directorial debut. And as such, it undoubtedly will be misunderstood and maligned by many who wonder what, exactly, the point is. And that's a good thing to wonder. Certainly "Last Days" hardly qualifies as a pleasant experience. Then again, "The Wild Bunch" isn't a barrel of yuks, either. Part of what elevates a film to greatness is the unity and integrity of its vision, as well as its ability to jar us into awareness, into new and startling experiences of reality.
One thing I know for sure: I walked out of "Last Days" wondering what the hell I'd just seen, and now I can't stop thinking about it. And I'm going to see it again, soon. I can't remember the last time that happened.
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