Last Days: Critic Reviews

There is a method to its madness, since the madness here is really Cobain's.

Mesmerizing dream of a film.

Last Days is unconventional and artistic but also ponderous.

Last Days leaves a haunting impression of a man who, even at the height of his fame and adulation, was hiding in plain sight.

It's definitely not a conventional biopic about Kurt Cobain.

Last Days is director Gus Van Sant's meditation on the death of Kurt Cobain, and an extraordinary meditation it is.

In place of psychological clarity, Last Days affords a woozy existential coherence.

Pitt also isn't required to replicate Cobain's offstage intensity or charisma or charm or whatever he had.

Weird, sad and dreamy.

Watching paint dry would be better. At least the paint would be busy drying.

This movie, depending on what you do with it, can be boring, brilliant or both.

In putting the onus for meaning on viewers, Van Sant has pinned the film's success to our subjectivity. It might not guarantee fondness. Yet what an extraordinary collaboration it makes.

Nor, on the other hand, is his film in the business of sanctification. It merely hints that some people, gifted or otherwise, may have had enough.

Last Days is a definitive record of death by gradual drug exhaustion. After the chills and thrills of Sid & Nancy and The Doors, here is a movie that sees how addicts usually die, not with a bang but a whimper.

Van Sant uses Cobain's image for a portrait of physical and moral disintegration, but he also exhilarates us with his mastery of image and sound.

A film about a junkie rock musician, played by Michael Pitt at his most narcissistic, doing nothing in particular for the better part of 97 minutes isn't my idea of either a good time or a serious endeavor.

While Last Days succeeds as a nature documentary, Van Sant fails to penetrate human nature. The result is a portrait without a face.

Sometimes we see Blake through the window, but, as he moves around the room, often we see nothing but the far wall. Depending on your perspective, this is either incredibly gutsy or incredibly boring.

It's all terribly self-conscious and desperately arty and fairly bad.

If you're going to make a movie about Kurt Cobain, you might as well make a movie about Kurt Cobain.

Within the limitations of the role, Pitt acquits himself very well as Blake, giving a nervy, physical performance that expresses character mostly through gait, mumbled dialogue and, most importantly, music with two songs he's credited with having written.

Sorely lacks the angry energy and wit Cobain brought to his work.

Last Days offers some insight into Cobain's final frame of mind, but balks at the gates of deeper truth.

Gus Van Sant ventures into the valley of death steering by an idiosyncratic compass and forsaking the aid of a conventional cinematic map.

Last Days is an extraordinarily potent brew.