Gus Van Sant meets the press at the Last Days premiere (Photo: STV)

For a while there, I had no idea what Gus Van Sant was doing. At my faith's lowest ebb, I did not think Gus Van Sant knew what Gus Van Sant was doing.

I know he deserved better from me: perhaps a more unwavering loyalty rooted in his earlier triumphs, or at least the benefit of the doubt based on one long-ago viewing of his transcendent Mala Noche. But Van Sant's extended Hollywood striving—checkered with the good (I cite Good Will Hunting unironically and unapologetically), the bad (Finding Forrester) and the insulting (Psycho)—had me believing something or someone had irreversibly poisoned his imagination, and that whatever attempt Van Sant was bound to make at professional atonement would probably be some wild, if not desperate, overcompensation.

In the end, Van Sant's overcompensation came down to a trilogy about death—not so original, sure, but a subject from which the filmmaker had always drawn the strength for his most lasting impressions. Moreover, from the miscreant street dwellers of Mala Noche to the junkies and hustlers of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant's quirky characters have, for whatever reason, been at their most resonant when hurtling toward self-destruction. However, their journeys had also involved scripts (or least a narrative) and some sort of measurable pacing. Van Sant's Gerry and Elephant, which began his own unscripted if not predictable journey back to credibility by relentlessly following the doomed, meandered through the director's most self-indulgent inclinations to relax and roll film and just let something happen.

That I no longer expected the unexpected, but rather, expected literally nothing from Van Sant is no small part of what anchors the appeal of his latest film, Last Days. A thinly veiled—nay, unveiled—portrayal of songwriter Kurt Cobain's haunted final moments preceding his 1994 suicide, Last Days does three remarkable things: First of all, it puts Van Sant back where he was thematically at the time of Cobain's death—which is to say, back where perpetually lost souls needed Van Sant's eye to legitimize them. Second of all, it precisely symbolizes the event that freed America to start prostituting its subculture in earnest. Van Sant was one of this trend's victims, for lack of a better word, and he knows it.

"There seemed to be a definite marking point between an early musical movement and something like a more mainstream cultural movement—this sort of alternative scene or moment," Van Sant told The Reeler at Last Days' premiere. That marking point bled from music to film, as well, and in reliving the transition as such, Last Days (which, not coincidentally, Picturehouse is releasing as Gus Van Sant's Last Days) unfolds as the director's most personal film by far.

Which brings me to the third remarkable quality: Despite dealing with Cobain's myth and an indelible cultural moment that more than just a few people have some nostalgia for, Van Sant avoids the sentimentality he had succumbed to during his own mainstream period. Not that nothing good ever came from the mainstream, but something as elegiac as Last Days proves that a filmmaker with Van Sant's aesthetic convictions can neither afford its security nor flourish in conditions of such stifling creative bankruptcy. Is it unfair to argue that he needed the flat, rambling conceits of Gerry and Elephant to square himself with the past? Possibly, but I would think it goes without saying he needed them to make something as redemptive as Last Days.

The film stars Michael Pitt as Blake, a Cobain look-alike who spends most of the film alternating between a languid narcolepsy and a mumbling stagger around his wooded estate. He shares his home with Luke (Lukas Haas), Asia (Asia Argento) and a few other housemates, all of whose sycophantic needs and complaints he works to evade. He roams the forest, eats sporadically and indulges famously Cobain-esque tendencies such as dress-wearing and gun-toting and noise-guitar wankery. He lives essentially without friends in a kind of sequestered nightmare realm where everyone who speaks to him attempts to sell him something—bandmates pitching an 86-date tour over the phone, a yellow-pages ad rep making a cold call to his front door and someone named Donovan trying to sell him out to the private eye (a classic Ricky Jay) whom Blake's mysterious wife Blackie has put on the rocker's trail. Even Blake's empathetic manager (Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon) tries to nudge him back into rehab against his will—she gives up when she knows that he has basically done the same thing. Alienation is too understated a word to describe Blake's condition; instead, he recalls the itinerant squalor of Idaho's Mike Waters, whose quest to find his mother shrouded him in vulnerability even as he moved deeper and deeper into irretrievable isolation.

Van Sant and ace cinematographer Harris Savides follow Blake in long, quiet takes recalling their last two collaborations, except that in Last Days, they provide their audience someone to watch: Pitt, most memorably seen last year fucking the brown out of Eva Green's hair in The Dreamers, is a revelation here. He is a ringer for Cobain, which bears mentioning but not overemphasis; he gets as few as three, maybe four close-ups in the entire film. No matter. His shuffling slouch and indistinguishable mutterings create the film's real atmosphere, and just when you think he has exhausted the junkie-chic schtick, Van Sant cues the musical showstopper to remind everyone exactly what we lost when Cobain died 11 years ago.

… And Courtney keeps calling—I am totally fucked. Michael Pitt and Kim Gordon commisserate (Photo: Picturehouse)

The songs are Pitt's, and he performs them live. And to call them derivative is to miss the film's point—Cobain was influential and Last Days is about his suffering, which he could only communicate musically until heroin addiction and chronic stomach pain demanded a more severe intervention. Pitt said he played the songs for the film's "music consultant" Thurston Moore, Gordon's husband and Sonic Youth bandmate from whom he clearly took some technical hints for the arresting live performance of "That Day."

"He was really the person who said we should put them in," Pitt told me. "I was reluctant about it, because I didn't want it to appear that I was doing it to try and better my own (musical) career or whatever." Yeah, Michael, well, one thing at a time, buddy; let us just be thankful the songs unmistakably capture the spare, elemental moment in time to which Van Sant pays homage.

For his part, Van Sant coyly told The Reeler that doing justice to the cultural moment is not necessarily something he did by design, explaining that these moments just happens by virtue of their individual components. I guess maybe that is true of his comment on celebrity in To Die For, or whatever misbegotten Hitchcock ruminations compelled him to remake a truly subversive cultural touchstone like Psycho. With regard to Last Days, his claim is more than a little disingenuous. After all, those are Kurt Loder's and Michael Azzerad's voices on the MTV footage playing in Blake's house following his suicide, and that is flannel his housemates are fond of wearing.

Van Sant's own self-reference, on the other hand—especially in terms of characterization and the dynamics of unrequited longing—does do a measure of justice to itself without too much strain, and thank God for that. Even with his Elephant Palme D'Or in his pocket (or especially with that in his pocket), I had no idea what I was going to do with the guy. And when he directs Blake's soul to literally climb from his body, you can kind of see Van Sant winking in the background as if to say, "OK, that is that. On to other things." I can only imagine what those other things will be, but at least now I am looking forward to them.