Last Days: Synopsis

"Last Days" is filmmaker Gus Van Sant's meditation on the inner turmoil that engulfs a brilliant, but troubled, musician in the final hours of his life. Michael Pitt ("The Dreamers," "Hedwig and the Angry Inch") stars as Blake, an introspective artist who is buckling under the weight of fame, professional obligations, and a mounting feeling of isolation. "Last Days" follows Blake through a handful of hours he spends in and near his wooded home, a fugitive from his own life. It is a period of random moments and fractured consciousness, fused by spontaneous bursts of rock & roll. Expanding on the elliptical style forged in his two previous films, "Gerry" and the Palme d'Or-winning "Elephant," Van Sant layers images and sounds to articulate an emotional landscape, creating a dynamic work about a soul in transition.

Dwarfed by towering trees, Blake slowly makes his way through dense woods. He scrambles down an embankment to a fresh spring, and undresses for a short swim. The next morning, he returns to his house, an elegant, if neglected, stone mansion.

Many people are looking for Blake - his friends, his managers and record label, even a private detective - but he does not want to be found. In the haze of his final hours, Blake will spend most of his time by himself. He avoids the people who are living in his house, who approach him only when they want something, be it money or help with a song. He hides from one concerned friend, and turns away another. He visits politely with a stranger from the Yellow Pages sales department, and he ducks into an underground rock club. He wanders through the woods, and he plays a new song, one last rock & roll blow out. Finally, alone in the greenhouse, Blake will look and listen - and seek release.

Although this film is inspired by the last days of Kurt Cobain, it is a work of fiction and none of the characters or events portrayed in the film are real.

With LAST DAYS, award-winning filmmaker Gus Van Sant takes his recent experiments with cinematic language to new levels of refinement, creating a film that is both poetic and life-like. The film pares away extraneous narrative to simply observe the bare experience of a troubled young musician approaching the end of his life. Through its handling of cinematic elements – images, sounds and actions – LAST DAYS draws us into an environment that is as much emotional and sensory as it is material. A film designed for individual interpretation, LAST DAYS is an intimate meditation on isolation, death and loss. It is a requiem and a remembrance.

LAST DAYS continues the aesthetic approach of Van Sant’s previous two films – the Palme d’Or-winning ELEPHANT (2003) and GERRY (2002). All three films have used elliptical storytelling, fixed settings and improvisational acting techniques to deliver multi-layered yet emotionally accessible presentations of human beings and their behavior. In each film, we spend time with the characters in their given environment and Van Sant’s attention to detail allows us to feel the characters’ sensations almost as our own.

Like its predecessors, LAST DAYS grew out of events covered in the media. “There’s a trilogy - films that are inspired by stories that were in the papers,” Van Sant observes. “GERRY was inspired by a news item about two guys that got lost in the desert. ELEPHANT was a way to look at the wave of school shootings, like Columbine, that happened in America in the late 90s. And LAST DAYS came out of the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994.”