Review of Last Days (2014) by Paul S — 19 Feb 2012

Not Exactly Kurt, Just Close Enough.

The other day, we were listening to the radio at a local fast food joint, and a Nirvana song was playing. I don't listen to Nirvana much, myself, not being a huge fan, so I'd forgotten. But in the song, Kurt was telling us over and over that he didn't have a gun. Which, as we all know, turns out not to have been true. I had to explain the joke to my companions, but a guy waiting for his own food smiled wryly. Everyone in this country of a certain age gets that joke, I think. They get why I always say that the moral to Kurt Cobain's story was "don't self-medicate for depression with heroin." There are some people who get very angry at me for making such remarks, but I think this movie shows that I may well understand what shapes a person like Kurt more than Gus Van Sant does. For people my age living in Western Washington, Kurt is in our bones--even if we didn't live here when he died. We all walk in his shadow in some ways.

This is not technically Kurt. This is Blake (Michael Pitt). Not all resemblance is coincidental, but there are differences. Blake's house, for example, is out in the boonies. He lives there with assorted hangers-on, though not his wife and child. I could be wrong, but I think said wife is the one who sent out a detective (Ricky Jay) to find him, though Blake does what he can to dodge the detective. Some guy from Yellow Book (Thadeus A. Thomas, essentially playing himself) shows up to sell Blake an ad; he says Blake bought one the year before, and Blake doesn't deny it. The household receives a visitation of Mormons. Blake might be working on some new songs. Kim Gordon, playing a record executive, comes to berate him about his lifestyle, calling him a rock and roll cliché. She is probably there in part on the behalf of the label, but she does seem genuinely worried on behalf of his daughter. She is, of course, right to worry.

I see what Van Sant is trying to do here, but I'm not sure he does it very well. The way to humanize Kurt Cobain is not to render him all but silent--the role was originally written as a silent one. A lot of people give Kurt a lot of grief for having lived and died as a self-centered, drug-addled freak. I can't dispute the drug-addled, of course, and I don't know the man himself well enough to dispute the self-centered. But I think the freak is how he felt, and I don't think Van Sant does anything to show him any other way. I think choosing silence set off by mumbling only leaves us with a Kurt as we used to see him on MTV. There is nothing to this which lets us see the character much at all. We are basically just filling in what we see with what we know about the real person. Unfortunately, I think Van Sant thinks he's giving us a deep impression of Kurt by watching how Blake does not interact with the real world, does not see the problems he's having.

Frankly, if he were going to go that way, he would have been better suited to have left the character silent. I think leaving us to put what we know of Kurt into Blake is not necessarily wrong. Even leaving a not-at-all-Kurt Blake as a cipher would have been perfectly acceptable. But no; we are somewhere in the middle, left with the impression that there is more to see here than we are being shown, more to know than Van Sant lets us learn. We only know that Blake has a child because he is berated, however briefly and gently, about her. I'm not entirely sure what relation anyone else in the house has to him; are they meant to be the other members of the band? Are they just the kind or hangers-on which rock stars accumulate? Are they people he has known since the Old Days--the equivalent of people Kurt would have met in Olympia or Aberdeen? I'm not sure. And I don't know if my lack of certainty has to do with the fact that it wasn't mentioned or the fact that I didn't catch it.

Oh, to be sure, there's no real need to psychoanalyze Kurt in film. His story is not a complicated one, for all certain fans choose to assume that it is. He was a small-town boy who never felt comfortable in his hometown. He was a pretty good musician. He finally made some friends because of it. He had clinical depression, maybe bipolar disorder, and he started taking drugs to make himself feel better. He chose the wrong drugs--and, to a greater or lesser extent, the wrong friends--and killed himself because he didn't think he would ever feel any better. The only reason there's anything special about his story is that he became famous; other than that, the story gets played out all the time. Perhaps the most telling factor in the story of his death is that the person who found him called a radio station before he called the police. Quite simply, Kurt himself is something to project our own images onto as much as Blake is something to project our images of Kurt onto. The film might have been better were it clear that Van Sant knows that.