PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 7/22/05)

From auteur to Hollywood hack and thankfully back to auteur, Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, Finding Forrester) again invokes a Bressonian austerity and the impressionistic, icily distanced long shots of Bela Tarr to build the last leg of what could be called his youth-culture death trilogy. After learning his new minimalist voice with the two-man desert survival allegory Gerry and splashing a career high-water mark with the tenderly lyricized ruminations of the Columbine massacre in Elephant, Van Sant's latest tone poem proves most reductive and least successful in its time-swallowed, non-linear take on the final fleeting moments of just one individual, a troubled Kurt Cobain-like rock god named Blake. The last frames of Last Days posit a disclaimer to fiction inspired by the Nirvana frontman's 1994 heroin-addled shotgun suicide, but even if Van Sant wisely chooses not to show either the drugs or the shooting, the fact remains that the real grunge martyr died for our cinema in this uncannily exploitative likeness.

Galumphing through the claustrophobically full-framed woods behind his dilapidated stone mansion, Blake (Michael Pitt, a spitting image in his dirty blonde scruff) lethargically mumbles to himself, bathes and pisses in the river, then builds and sings over a campfire. Aloofly out of touch with everyone in his life, especially himself, Blake seems asleep to his own wandering whims, putting the mac-and-cheese box in the fridge instead of the milk and playing his guitar when he isn't just passing out. Living upstairs, hangers-on like Asia Argento and Lukas Haas wander in and out of this existence, as do private detective Ricky Jay and unnecessary clubgoer cameo Harmony Korine, all of whom are background fodder to the haunting long-takes that offer a retinal equivalent to TV screen burn-in. Van Sant has mastered this kind of driftingly contemplative imagery and his layered soundscapes would make Sonic Youth proud (of course, Kim Gordon makes an appearance), but the introduction of other characters fracture the film's greatest asset, its lonely first-person atmosphere. Worse than that, the disconnect underlines Van Sant's stand-offish pretensions as art-wanky (must we be punished with an entire Boys II Men video to grasp his sloppy critique on the music industry?), detached to the point of frustrating inaccessibility. Ultimately, neither Gerry nor Elephant needed the memories of their true-life counterparts to stand alone as great works, yet Last Days banks on a gawking curiousity so isolated by its sensory surfaces that it remains both mesmerizing and defiantly unengaging, a vividly self-defeating exercise on both sides of the screen. —Aaron Hillis