End of the Road

Lightness of being: Van Sant's existential Kurt Cobain movie is an opaque masterpiece

Comments (0) By Dennis Lim Tuesday, Jul 12 2005

...continued from page 1

photo: HBO Films/Picturehouse

Come as you are: Pitt

Details

Last Days
Written and directed by Gus Van Sant
Picturehouse, opens July 22

KURTAIN CALL: A decade after his death, a new movie imagines the final days of Nirvana's elusive frontman

Van Sant's Own Private Biopic
by Rob Nelson

Former 'Dawson's Creek' Star Tackles a Mythic Musician
by Laura Sinagra

All Van Sant's Cowboys Get the Blues
by Joshua Clover

Audio Guru Finds a Method for Cobain's Mumbles
by Joshua Land

'Last Days' Misses Out on Cobain's Populist Passion
by Robert Christgau

Peril-Fraught Subgenre of the Rockstar Movie
by Jessica Winter

April 1994 'Voice' Report on Cobain Suicide
by Ann Powers

More About

Where Elephant's kids are unwitting lambs to the slaughter, Blake knows as well as we do the foregone conclusion. Last Days' blurred sense of interior and exterior—its living-death conception of limbo—brings to mind another American masterpiece (with which it could have exchanged titles): Jarmusch's Dead Man, whose enigmatic hero happens to be called William Blake. Sacred allusions abound: the waterfall baptism (or final ablution?), the Mormon callers, the devotional ecstasy of the featured songs, and above all the climactic separation of body and skyward-bound soul. Not unlike William Blake, Van Sant risks religiosity and arrives at spiritual clarity—in a ghostly afterimage that transcends both the Christian notion of Ascension and the rock cliché of the stairway to heaven. Pointedly contradicting Cobain's Neil Young–quoting suicide note, Blake doesn't burn out—he fades away.