"Last Days": The death of rock 'n' roll, with a bowl of Cocoa Puffs on the side
There's a lot I didn't understand about Gus Van Sant's "Last Days." Well, OK, that's a facetious comment. There's not that much to understand: Playing a knife-blade-skinny Pacific Northwest rock star named Blake with a strong resemblance to you-know-who, Michael Pitt barely speaks an intelligible sentence in the whole movie (except to a Yellow Pages salesman). He wanders around his decrepit, filthy mansion mumbling to himself, dressed variously in a woman's slip, or as Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny, or as Admiral Peary on his way to the pole. He can't quite stand up, but can't quite lie down. He goes swimming. He digs up a box in the yard, but we don't really know what's in it. (Or maybe we do.) He eats chocolate cereal. He eats packaged macaroni and cheese. He kills himself.

At first you think, oh, this is the sort of movie that has a pretty abstract beginning before it introduces its characters, establishes its narrative context, gets us launched on some kind of plot. Nope. "Last Days" has stuff in it, all right: almost an entire video by Boyz II Men, an appearance by Mormon twin-brother missionaries, a red-herring subplot involving a private eye played by magician Ricky Jay, the same events observed repeatedly from different points of view, an intricately constructed soundscape that's almost as important as what you see on the screen. It's a meticulous nest of interlocking elements, not at all haphazard. But in its unrelieved bleakness and singularity of vision, it supplies very little in the way of conventional movieness.

Blake has an incestuous posse of hangers-on in his house, including an asshole band mate (Scott Green) who keeps listening to the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs," a geeky acolyte (Lukas Haas) and a couple of unspecified chicks (Asia Argento and Nicole Vicius). But we learn almost nothing about them, except that they're almost aggressively unconcerned about Blake. It's a household of sad, selfish and cruel children, incapable of caring for themselves or others.

What's startling about "Last Days" is both the pinpoint accuracy of its depiction -- not necessarily of Cobain, but of the indie-rock lifestyle he epitomized -- and the force of its indictment. Although Van Sant is now in his 50s, he certainly emerged from a quasi-underground bohemia in Portland not too different from the later Cobain milieu. If you ever spent time in freezing, mouse-infested apartments and houses crowded with dusty amplifiers, encrusted spaghetti pots and jumbled stacks of naked LPs -- and, boy oh boy, I did -- "Last Days" may induce a cold sweat of nostalgia. All Blake does with his fame and wealth, in Van Sant's version, is inscribe that dreary, unshampooed lifestyle on a larger canvas.

Kim Gordon of the legendary indie-rock band Sonic Youth shows up here as a record executive trying to rescue Blake. Is this ironic casting? Not really. Like her husband and band mate Thurston Moore (Van Sant's musical consultant for this film), Gordon is living proof that not everyone from the alt-rock scene went through the dramatic self-absorption, and suicidal excess, represented by Cobain.

"Do you talk to your daughter?" Gordon's character asks Blake. "Do you say you're sorry for being a rock 'n' roll cliché?" This might be the only scene in "Last Days" where people actually speak to each other and communicate, and of course it's fruitless. The old Van Sant would have focused on the damaged beauty of Blake's body and soul; the new Van Sant is at least trying to steel himself against all that. "Last Days" describes not just the death of a talented, damaged person but the dead end of a self-indulgent alternative culture that had worn itself out and run out of ideas. You can actually listen to "Venus in Furs" too many times.

"Last Days" opens July 22 in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, with a wider release to follow.

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