Last Days
First screened in August 2005 / Most recently screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Gus Van Sant. Cast: Michael Pitt, Scott Patrick Green, Asia Argento, Ryan Orion, Ricky Jay, Lukas Haas, Nicole Vicius, Kim Gordon, Thadeus A. Thomas, Harmony Korine. Screenplay: Gus Van Sant. In Brief:
Van Sant achieves a bold apotheosis of his austere early-00s aesthetic. Even so, its rewards to head and heart are huge.
VOR:⑤
Last Days could be used to teach new approaches to sound, script, image, or structure, and it would survive all that teaching with its mysteries intact.
Lots to say about all four of the Gus Van Sant films I re-screened yesterday (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant, and this) as well as his latest, the curious, multi-toned, and unoredictable Dead Man's Wire. I'll have my first chance to say some of it in the hour-long Master Class interview I'll be conducting with Van Sant this Saturday at 2:30 at the Chicago International Film Festival, as part of their Industry Days sidebar, giving current students and especially aspiring filmmakers some insider info and lived experience from folks who've already made their way (and are still making it, by hook or by crook, as witness the 25 producers and financing groups billed at the start of Dead Man's Wire!).
I do just want to put some extra glow on Last Days, though, because as much as it's designed to frustrate expectations and be almost anti-cathartic, it's always been one of my personal favorite Van Sants (a group that also includes Psycho, so I guess he coaxes out my perverse side). Largely brushed off by U.S. critics as a re-application of Gerry and Elephant techniques to an arguably inapposite subject and/or as an itchily bizarre Kurt Cobain commemoration, Last Days has little if any of the conventional pleasure or warmth that "commemoration" might promise. The film lands with me, though, as a brave act of honesty, working through and making sensate just how isolating celebrity, money, genius, artistry, and chronic illness might be, more or less in that order (or perhaps not?), and how you might wind up becoming a stowaway or refugee in your own life as a means of staying even provisionally "in" it, as long as that's bearable.
Van Sant's formally rigorous approach to that idea—beyond giving one of the best-ever showcases to two titans of their fields, sound designer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Harris Savides—makes sure these ideas come through not as pathos or as abstraction but as minute-by-minute experience of a life that is perpetually intruded-upon but at the same time defiantly solitary, and not just by design. The sparse amount of actual music-making is an apt but provocative corollary to just how much time this vaunted music-maker probably got for his craft. Which isn't to say Cobain played no role in this swelling alienation and gangrenous dissatisfaction, or that they didn't induce complexities for other people, whether you were an unannounced drop-in or, poignantly, a young and uncontacted daughter. (That this last detail seemed not to have aligned with the real Cobain's experience, while making strong dramatic sense in the movie, is an apt cue to treat Michael Pitt's "Blake" as a different person and not a strictly biographical mimeograph, despite his having even more strands of Cobain's DNA than Frances Bean does.)
Last Days is among Van Sant's saddest movies but also, when it wants to be, easily among his funniest. The extended use of Boyz II Men's "On Bended Knee" in the beginning is as side-splitting as it is unexpected. And with yet another heavy-weather, pop-psychologized Great Musician Bio dropping in two weeks (though I won't judge the Springsteen pic till I see it), Van Sant's movie is a principled reminder that if we don't want to chew from the same market-tested menu all the time, we have to be willing to venture out and test cinematic conceptions that we haven't been relentlessly pre-tutored on how to watch, listen to, think about, feel, or "understand." And not just as a conceptual exercise: I feel an enormous amount for Cobain through this movie, increasingly as it goes, even though both the character and the film refuse to marshal a single one of the usual tactics for "making us care."
The French got it: Last Days was the Cahiers du cinéma's pick for the best movie of 2005, not that their list doesn't often traffic in counter-intuitive, willfully off-consensus parries. Over here, Last Days barely registered, which is possibly how Cobain would have wanted it. I think it played for one week in one theater in Hartford, CT, where i was then living, before it made its diaphanous exit, in close sync with one of Van Sant's concluding images. That's the only other time I'd seen the movie before yesterday. But I've never forgotten those long circular pans, the speaker-rattling use of "Venus in Furs," the wet Seattle air, the moss growing outside but also on the kitchen cabinets, and the howl of improv'd one-man-band music emanating from one window as if from a constricted throat, while Savides's camera retreats further and further back from it. (Most filmmakers would have pushed further and further in.)
Lots else about Last Days I had forgotten, so I recommend re-viewings if it's also been 20 years for you. I recommend even more heartily a first viewing if that's your situation, even though it's entirely fair and possible that you'll end up hating it, and it's uncomfotable if also important to remember that artists are probably different people than we've devised in our minds, leading very different lives than we assume, with absolutely no obligation to love us back. Grade:A–
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
Awards:
Cannes Film Festival: Technical Grand Prize (Leslie Shatz, sound design)
