Gloomy Gus

Shady character: Michael Pitt in Gus Van Sant's film Last Days. Courtesy Odeon Films.

For many people of my thirtysomething generation, Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 represented the end of something much larger than a rock musician’s life. It was the end of grunge, and despite the era’s many shortcomings (and many bad bands), it was ostensibly a “movement” towards honesty and emotional nakedness, disdainful of artifice and superficiality. Cobain, whether by intent or accident, was an emblem of this authenticity, and for many, he represented the last time a great and popular musician strove for some kind of capital-T truth, both in his art and his life. He was an exemplar of a kind of punk purity, and his apparent suicide was the only possible result, it seems, when such values are confronted and then contorted by the real world.

Of course, this all sounds very romantic, and it’s the exact kind of romanticization that director Gus Van Sant has been exploring throughout his career. From his hustler parables (Mala Noche, My Own Private Idaho) to the more middlebrow stories of working-class heroes (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester), Van Sant has relentlessly dissected what it means to be young, male, talented and screwed up. In Last Days, that young screw-up is a Cobain doppelganger named Blake (Michael Pitt), a strung-out rocker holed up in a crumbling mansion, measuring out his final hours in bowls of mac ’n’ cheese and half-hearted interventions by friends and associates. For Van Sant, Cobain was, in many ways, the epitome of the messed-up man-boy.

The gaunt and androgynous Pitt is a passable ringer for Cobain, and he’s costumed accordingly, appearing in the little black dress, striped sweater and dimestore shades recognizable from numerous Nirvana photo shoots. The film opens with Blake in a T-shirt, pajama bottoms and hospital bracelet, wandering the verdant woods near his house. He’s a feral creature, with lank hair constantly obscuring his face, who bathes naked in a waterfall, wails Home on the Range by a campfire and cowers before a passing train. All the while, he mumbles incoherently, a schizoid stream-of-consciousness that dominates the soundtrack while revealing nothing.

Blake eventually returns to his house. It’s never quite clear whether it’s his home — a handful of vampiric friends are also staying there — or a hideout. At any rate, Blake is hiding out — from his roommates, an angry tour manager and an even angrier wife by the name of Blackie. Blake turns from them all, ever more inward. The outside world continues to intrude, however, whether in the form of a Yellow Pages ad salesman — one of very few comic scenes in the film — or a Boyz II Men video that blares while Blake slowly nods out.

In the throes of creativity: Michael Pitt gets down in Last Days. Courtesy Odeon Films.

Very little else transpires. Blake plays music only twice — and this almost an hour into the film — but both of these scenes are riveting reminders of why Cobain held such a fascination. Van Sant wisely avoids using any actual Nirvana music, instead allowing Pitt to play his own Cobain-inspired compositions, That Day and Death to Birth; the actor successfully imitates Cobain’s hunched, anguished postures and soul-searing croak.

But just as Cobain’s music is never heard, neither is his voice. Van Sant studiously avoids explicating Cobain’s death — or even his reasons for wanting to die. Blake is never shown taking drugs, but his slightly bruised arms and paranoia suggest that he’s constantly on them. Kim Gordon from the band Sonic Youth makes a brief cameo, and her character (a therapist? a concerned aunt?) lays into Blake for turning into a rock ’n’ roll cliché. But Van Sant cuts the scene before Blake can even pretend to defend himself. The film implies that Cobain’s death was so pointless that to imagine any justification would be both limiting and futile.

This narrative strategy is comparable to Van Sant’s more successful avoidance tactics in Elephant (2003), his thinly veiled account of the Columbine shootings. In Last Days, however, it seems more of a lapse in imagination than an aesthetic decision. Cobain was a charmer, presumably to the end, and Pitt can be as well — but Van Sant allows him to display it in only the briefest of interactions with other characters. Instead of really working to understand Cobain, Van Sant offers instead his own romantic cliché, the doomed, self-destructive artist — which seems as false as anything Cobain might have stood against.

This cliché is made worse by Van Sant’s tendency to hackneyed symbolism. Blake’s name is an obvious nod to visionary poet William Blake, and, if you don’t get this, then the snatches of experimental composer Hildegard Westerkamp’s Doors of Perception, itself inspired by Blake, make the point even more obvious.

But while the film doesn’t get inside its hero’s head, it does a brilliant job of placing the viewer in his worn-out tennis shoes. The film is expertly modulated. The complex, forbidding soundtrack (birdcalls, voices, Westerkamp’s music) and the almost instinctive editing — where, like in Van Sant’s Elephant, scenes replay and restage themselves — have a narcotic, delirious effect. It’s a very effective gambit, and it suggests much more than just a stylistic trick.

All of Van Sant’s recent films seem haunted by the overdose death of River Phoenix, who starred in the director’s My Own Private Idaho (1991). Rumours abound about Van Sant’s complicity in Phoenix’s heroin use, and even in interviews about Last Days, the filmmaker has mentioned the actor — who died just a few months before Cobain. Perhaps Blake is barely even Cobain in Van Sant’s mind, but more of an Everyboy who also encompasses Phoenix. But art can’t bring anybody back from the dead, and Van Sant’s failure to get at the heart of Cobain’s suicide might, in the end, speak more to his powerlessness as a human being than his failure as a filmmaker.

Last Days opened Aug. 5 in Montreal and opens Aug. 12 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Jason McBride is a writer and editor in Toronto.