By Jeffery Wells

Last Days is a fictional account of the last hours in the life of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana pop star who took himself out with a shotgun blast in '94.

That's right...hours, not days. The use of "days" in a title implies at least three 24-hour cycles, if you ask me, and it didn't seem to me as if what happens in the film takes place over more than two days. It could be occurring in a single day...not that this matters very much.

It stars Michael Pitt (The Dreamers) as a Cobain-like figure called Blake, and for what it's worth Pitt is very heavily into his character's pain. He convinced me he's really going through the same crap that Cobain was reportedly caught up in just before the end.

Like Van Sant's Gerry and Elephant, Days is the last part of a trilogy (or so I've read) that uses a heavily deconstructed narrative. That's a high-falutin' way of saying there's nothing routinely composed about it. There's no scripted dialogue or story tension or close-ups or multi-angled editing. You know...none of that phony, tricked-up stuff.

Remember those long unbroken shots of kids walking through school hallways in Elephant? Same deal here, except this time the subjects are spaced-out, inarticulate heroin users hanging out inside an unheated home and doing stoned musician-type stuff...talking about music, cooking up macaroni-and-cheese in the grungy kitchen, having sex, listening to the Velvet Underground in their living room, etc.

It's mostly about Blake, of course, who plays a tune at one point and is shown taking an overnight hike through the woods early on. Mostly, however, he avoids the phone and runs away whenever someone knocks on a door and spends a lot of time sitting around like a zombie and nodding out.

Cobain had a heroin problem near the end of his life and Blake is obviously using big-time in the film, but Van Sant chooses not to show him hitting up. A journalist friend is telling me there's a brief view of track marks on Blake's arm, but I missed this if it's there. I think it's dishonest not to show Blake doing the deed. It's a little like making a film about a man dying of cancer in a hospital but not showing any scenes with doctors or nurses or chemotherapy.

Remember that rumor about Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix getting into heroin when they acted in Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, and Reeves coping with a lingering usage problem when he was acting in Francis Coppola's Dracula? I don't know anything at all, but an agent friend who claimed to be in a position to know told me it wasn't a rumor. Or at least, not entirely.

The most alive scene in Last Days happens when one of Blake's bandmates plays the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs," from their 1967 banana album. You know...that plodding, screechy, strangely hypnotic cut in which Lou Reed sings "I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years"? And uses the word "severin" over and over? (I never knew what that word meant.)

Looking east from beach adjacent to American Pavillion -- Friday, 5.13.05, 1:48 pm. What I mean is that I was hugely grateful when this cut was played because something, at last, was happening of a focused nature.

If you ask me that banana album, which also has the famous Reed song "Heroin," is filled with junkie music. Likewise, Last Days really gets the heroin-user menality. (It'll probably be a big hit with addicts when it comes out on DVD.) I knew some guys who were into smack when I was in my early 20s, and the way they sat around and talked and basically did very little...that's this movie, all right.