Last Days

Gus Van Sant's Kurt Cobain-inspired meditation on the final hours of a gifted musician

Actor Michael Pitt portrays the lost figure at the center of director Gus Van Sant’s latest excursion into unknown territory. The film is Last Days, a stark walk through a dying artist’s final moments inspired by the death of one of rock history’s great tragic heroes. Like Van Sant’s most recent films, Gerry and Elephant, an improvised script and freedom from routine cinematic language gives Last Days a hyper-real, oddly poetic flow of events, but Pitt insists it’s not a difficult film. “I know it can seem like a lot is really cryptic,” he said, “but everything is really thought out. There’s a lot of things we did that are there, but not in your face.”

With Last Days, Van Sant expands on the experiments of his last two films, opening his lens wider and letting the silence ring longer. Pitt (pictured above) is Blake, first seen stumbling alone in the wilderness, a caveman in pajamas and sunglasses. Through a random series of events we learn that he’s a rock musician living in a once-elegant mansion gone seedy with neglect, with a small entourage of housemates who incessantly seek him for advice, money and affirmation. Presumably stoned beyond repair, Blake spends Last Days dodging so-called friends, bandmates and other intrusions of the outside world, unable to secure the peace he craves.

There’s no doubt that Blake is intended to recall the late Kurt Cobain; Pitt’s emaciated frame, bedraggled blonde shag, pink sunglasses and general demeanor is sometimes uncanny in its resemblance to the long-mourned star. Van Sant cops to being influenced by the mystery of Cobain’s final hours, but the Last Days story has little in common with the facts of the case, keeping only the essential themes. “With Kurt Cobain, nobody really knew where he was the last couple of days, and what was going on,” Van Sant says. “The inspiration for Last Days was not so much the immediate event, but the ensuing questions of what happened—which was its own media event.”

Pitt submerges so deeply into the swampy depths of Blake’s character that he ends up somewhere beyond acting. His eyes are obscured behind unwashed hair and tinted plastic for most of his screen time, and when he speaks, the words dissolve into inaudible mumbles. Near the end Blake finds an acoustic guitar and is roused from his somnambulism long enough to play a wrenching ballad to himself in the film’s most affecting scene. The song, entitled “Death to Birth,” sure sounds like one of Cobain’s minor-chord folk/blues laments, but it was actually written by Pitt himself, years ago, before he’d even met Gus Van Sant.

That first encounter occurred in 1997 through a mutual friend, casting director Lori Eastside (“I actually went over there to borrow 20 bucks,” says Pitt). Van Sant had already begun drafting an early version of Last Days and thought the young actor might be right for the main character. At this point in the process, all Van Sant had was a list of things that a kid alone in a house might do over the course of a day, but the concept was pushed to the back burner. In the meantime, both kept busy, to say the least. Pitt became a dreamboat via Dawson’s Creek, worked for directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and Barbet Schroeder, and stood out as the narcissistic muse in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Van Sant captured Hollywood with Good Will Hunting, confused it with Psycho, apologized with Finding Forrester and then made two of the most uncompromising films of his career.