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Gus Van Sant has never been one to shy away from a challenge, so if anyone was going to put together a movie ‘inspired by the last days of Kurt Cobain', it was going to be the maverick Kentucky-born writer-director. With Cobain dead for more than a century, the subject matter of Last Days is nowhere near as fraught as that of Elephant, Van Sant's close-to-the-bone recreation of the Columbine high school massacre, but with lawsuit-happy widow Courtney Love around the director has wisely opted to distance his film from reality with false names and settings. Cobain has been notionally fictionalised into a troubled rockstar named Blake, played by Michael Pitt, and the film is recounted in drifting, near-silent sequences following the star's melancholic, lonely final days, roaming around his shambolic mansion and surrounding woodland estate, with musician friends and hangers-on dropping in and out of the background. The result is a compelling slow-motion trawl through the ravaged psyche of a troubled talent and, whilst its vagueness won't be to all tastes, Last Days is an accomplished insight. |
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Last Days