Last Days

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant wrote and directed this meditation on stardom and its costs, inspired in part by the life and death of rock musician Kurt Cobain. Blake (Michael Pitt) is the leader of an influential alternative rock band who has unexpectedly won a large degree of fame and fortune. Depressed and unsure of what to do with himself or his success, Blake wanders about the run-down mansion he calls home and the visits the woods nearby. While a handful of friends live with Blake, he prefers to avoid them, as they often seem more interested in money or help with their music than in his friendship; meanwhile, Blake is also confronted by a handful of fans, his agent, and a gentleman who sells advertising space in a telephone directory and has no idea who Blake is. As Blake goes through the motions of his day, he tries to decide what he should do next, and what might finally free him from his ennui. Shot and edited in the same languid, low-key manner as his films Elephant and Gerry, Last Days also stars Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green, Ricky Jay, and Harmony Korine. Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth also appears in the film, while her husband and bandmate Thurston Moore was a consultant for the musical score; both were friends of Kurt Cobain and toured in tandem with Nirvana on several occasions. — Mark Deming

AMG Review:
Gus Van Sant's well-made Last Days has one insurmountable fault, it feels entirely unnecessary. The main problem is that the director has chosen to evoke the memory of Kurt Cobain so directly that it will be the only way for the vast majority of viewers to approach the film. While Michael Pitt offers a sparse, mumbling performance that captures the depression of the main character, the director is unable to make the character particularly meaningful. In Van Sant's previous film, the award-winning Elephant, he took a real-life event (the Columbine shootings) and set up a fictional account of the incident that would allow people to talk about why it happened. The motivations of school-shooters are rarely fully understood, but Cobain made his troubled inner life crystal clear in the songs he created in the year before his death. Pitt wrote two songs that he performs in the film. They are well done and work both as pieces of music and as glimpses inside the character's soul, but "All Apologies" and "I Hate Myself and Want to Die," did the same things and did them much more memorably. Taken back to back, those songs accomplish everything this film wants to and much more. — Perry Seibert