And yet ''Last Days" is more than a self-indulgent stunt, for buried within its grainy longueurs is an epitaph for one of rock's lost boys: a musician who responded to the world with a roar of pain and then, when that roar became another commodity in the pop marketplace, with druggy silence and death. A movie like this could have been made about any of our burned-out idols -- Jim Morrison, possibly; Elvis Presley, certainly -- but in its unstated cynicism, beauty, and self-pity, ''Last Days" fits the myth of Cobain like a torn pair of jeans.
It's not ''Kurt Cobain" up there on the screen, of course. For legal and metaphorical reasons (take your pick), actor Michael Pitt (''The Dreamers") is playing a character named Blake, a ghostly figure with stringy blond hair, wearing a variety of parkas and women's lingerie, and glimpsed mostly in long-shot, as if Van Sant were afraid of spooking him into flight.
The setting is a decrepit castle in the woods, where the housemates include a fellow band member named Scott (Scott Green) and his girlfriend (Asia Argento). A few hangers-on tramp through, as well as a traitorous ex-bandmate (Ryan Orion), a chatty detective (Ricky Jay), a mother figure (Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth) who may or may not be a hallucination, and a Yellow Pages salesman (Thadeus A. Thomas). Blake is the reason they're all there, yet the great star inhabits a silent parallel universe. He's always at least one room away.
On the rare occasions when he can be pinned down, it's to be asked by a would-be musician (Lukas Haas) for help writing lyrics, or to be pep-talked over the phone by nervous label executives hoping he'll tour. Blake has clearly gone far beyond nervous breakdown into total incapacitation, but because he's a cash cow he's indulged, no more so than in the borderline-surreal scene in which the Yellow Pages salesman blandly tries to close his deal while ignoring the human wreckage before him. No one really sees Blake, anyway -- they see only what they need from him.
