Last Days takes place in the final hours before the death of a purported icon, but its tone is post-elegiac. When the film begins, a spiritual death has already taken place, and the time of mourning has passed. Doorbells and telephones ring endlessly through the film, sounding like they're coming from the steeple of some distant church. As the rock star played by Michael Pitt stumbles through his house in a perpetual twilight, the inevitability of his fate is not tragic but bittersweet. There is no struggle; only resignation.

This is Gus Van Sant's third film in his trilogy about death; the first two films were Gerry and Elephant, and like those, this is a minimalist supposition based in fact. The delineation of factuality from the first film to the last is prominent; most people who've seen Gerry don't even realize that it's based on a true story; on the other hand, while it contained no specific parallels between real and fictional characters, no one who saw Elephant could pretend it wasn't about the Columbine killings. Last Days continues this progression, and this time Van Sant only barely manages to sidestep fact and create a work of impressionism. It is a remarkably beautiful film, but it walks a dangerous line.

The Rock Star is named Blake, and while he isn't meant to literally be Kurt Cobain, the parallels are neither subtle nor shied away from; indeed, the film is dedicated to Cobain, and I think it's clear that Blake is meant to be an avatar through which Gus Van Sant can ruminate on Cobain's state of mind just prior to his suicide; a death which, from the perspective of someone coming of age at the time - a little too young to be into Nirvana but old enough to be shocked by the news that morning in 1994 - uprooted an entire culture, and one that still seems too momentous, too big, to demean with a traditional biopic.

By abandoning the pretense of telling a true story, Van Sant allows himself the freedom to explore, and to apply his own impression without stepping on anyone's toes. It's an approach that on the one hand is more respectful than a biopic: respectful to Cobain, whose life isn't squeezed into a box suggesting to be fact; and to the audience, whose preconceived notions and impressions of an event that can only be imagined about are not challenged. Conversely, the risk inherent to this is that Cobain is too iconic, and Pitt's performance too similar to that icon, to allow the film to be accepted as a work of interpretative fiction. If one cannot abandon one's own impressions of its subject, Last Days will seem pointless, or even upsetting in its refusal to come to any sort of definitive conclusion.

Coming to conclusions, of course, is exactly what Van Sant has avoided in his trilogy. When this film begins, Blake is wandering through the rambling woods near his rural mansion. A train passes in a moment of gentle lyricism. He wanders through a waterfall, builds a fire, and finally returns to a household that seems most oblivious to his presence. There are people in the house - bandmates, friends, played by Lukas Haas and Asia Argento, among others - but they are amorphous, interchangeable, and their presence has no cause or effect (either on Blake or each other). More definitive presences do appear: a private detective, a manager, and through them it is suggested that Blake has escaped from a rehab clinic. The film is full of inference, with little implication. The first thing Blake does when he returns home is determinedly dig up a cigar box buried in his backyard. What's in it? Heroin? Is he relapsing? It's a good guess, but the truth is one of those things Van Sant leaves to the ellipses of the film, the private moments that occur between the long walks from one place to another that, as in Elephant and Gerry, define the pace and structure of the film.

The film has the extreme subtlety of Gerry, as well as the multi-character, subtly nonlinear structure of Elephant. What it has that is all its own is a level of literal surrealism. There are instances where we see the same event happen from different perspectives, and the slight difference in the performances in the different takes create a barely perceptible shift in the reality of the film; but more distinctly, the film is elevated to a different plane sound design by Leslie Shatz, whose work was indelible in Van Sant's last two films but becomes a character all its own here. There are the aforementioned doorbells and telephones that take on lives of their own, becoming aural symphonies that exist only in Blake's addled mind; and then there is the scene where he sits at his drum set and improvises a majestic cacophony of screams and chords that very clearly leaves the realm of live performance and becomes an element of the soundtrack: something mixed, recorded, made permanent, a memory. It is something he's played before; something he remembers; or, alternatively, something he imagines himself playing, an expression to pure to become physically tangible. Cinematographer Harris Savides' camera, framing him through a window and slowly pulling further and further back, supports both of these possibilities, or perhaps an amalgamation of them. Regardless, this moment is anything but verite, and I think those that prescribe that term to Van Sant's seemingly endless and mundane takes are very much mistaken.

There's a third instance of surrealism at the end of the film, blatant enough that I need not mention it here. And there is another scene, too, where Blake performs another song entitled 'Death To Birth' (written by Pitt himself) in its entirety, in a long, uncut take. The camera does not move in this scene, and neither does the soundtrack add any suppositions of its own; this is the second of three scenes where Blake achieves some degree of clarity, enough to suggest what he's fallen from. In the first, Blake pours himself a bowl of cocoa crispies, and places the box of cereal back in the refrigerator instead of the milk; this is funny, but also so simple and clear a failure at approximating normality that it's very nearly heartbreaking. The third instance occurs, again, at the end, and it's the only close up of Blake in the entire film, the only time he brushes his hair from out of his suddenly illuminated eyes. The next morning, he's found dead by the gardener.

I say that this is a moment of clarity on Blake's part, and at first this seems to be so - but it's actually Van Sant's clarity, implied by his camera, and it's one of the few moments where he actually seems to be suggesting something definite; what that is is still left open - perhaps Blake is simply looking at a passing cloud - but this moment, and its placement in the film, is a climax designed by Van Sant. This could be perceived as a fault, a moment of overt subjugation. I choose to see it differently. In its way it serves the same purpose as the disclaimer that follows shortly thereafter, at the end of the closing credits. It reminds us that, as loose and haphazard as the film may seem, as open to interpretation as it clearly is, it also represents Van Sant's own feelings on the subject he's attempting to represent. Last Days is the most imperfect of the trilogy, and I think that's because it is not only the most representational of the films, but the most personal. Personal to Van Sant, and personal to the audience; and thus, for the latter too close to embrace, and for the former too big too fully capture, even in impression.