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A haunting look at a rock star's 'Last Days'

His face obscured by a curtain of hair, strung-out rock star Blake (Michael Pitt) is literally hiding in plain sight. He's the familiar yet unknowable conundrum at the heart of "Last Days," director Gus Van Sant's fictional meditation on the sad, hazy end of Kurt Cobain.

It's a pretty great movie — on its own idiosyncratic terms. But those very terms also make it the kind of flick likely to drive most folks crazy with boredom. How many people would I personally recommend it to? I can count them on one hand.

Fine Line Features 'Last Days' B The verdict: A haunting-but-daunting immersion into the drugged-out final hours of a Kurt Cobain-alike. Director: Gus Van Sant Starring: Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Kim Gordon, Ryan Fellner Run time: 97 minutes Release date: July 22, 2005 Rating: R for language and some sexual content. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime [an error occurred while processing this directive]

The last in Van Sant's informal young-death trilogy (after "Elephant" and "Gerry"), "Days" is an immersion in the deep end of the fame pool, where no lifeguards are checking whether swimmers are waving or drowning.

Shot in long, single takes, the movie willfully tests your patience. You wish it would hurry up. Yet when it ends, it haunts you for a few days. (Well, me anyway.)

We meet Blake muttering and stumbling through a damp forest. A rehab escapee, he's heading back home — or to his house anyway, since "home" suggests something warmer, safer. His isolated mansion is more a fortress: chunky stone facade, and inside crumbling walls that look as mossy as the woods around the estate.

The rooms are filled with Blake's old friends — stoned parasites who pay almost as little attention to the zonked star as he does to them.

When one of these hangers-on (Asia Argento) opens a door the passed-out Blake is slumped against, knocking him to the floor, all she does is prop him back up and tiptoe away.

This is the closest "Last Days" comes to assigning blame for Blake's dead-end predicament. His pals "protect" him from a private eye (Ricky Jay) sent by Blake's unseen wife to find him.

Only when they're away, partying, does another friend (Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth) infiltrate the house, trying to get Blake back to rehab. When she hears he's talked on the phone to his daughter, she asks, "Do you say 'I'm sorry that I'm a rock 'n' roll cliche?'"

For the most part, "Last Days" doesn't judge. It shows rather than explaining, analyzing or offering dramatic exchanges. We watch Blake do things. Make macaroni. Sing a song. Pass out. Repeat. And then it all ends.

Van Sant varies his straight-ahead, cinema verite approach near the end. He tinkers with chronology, showing a couple of scenes from different perspectives. For a moment, we get the sense of being caught in a loop that might feel a little like being stuck with Blake in his addiction.

That insular sensation is helped by a soundtrack of peculiar, almost subliminal noises: church bells, splashing water, an industrial thump-thump that sounds like an unbalanced washing machine.

Some viewers will be frustrated by Van Sant's decision to strip away motivation, narrative and the usual building blocks of traditional film. (The sparse, disconnected dialogue could fill five pages, maybe.) Others will get onto its wavelength and appreciate the approach.

But even they may have a hard time forgiving moments of what seem to be intentional torture — especially when Van Sant makes us watch an insipid Boys II Men music video in its entirety. His cooler-than-thou posture sometimes gets the better of him.

But in the end he uses a special-effects shot that, in someone else's movie, would reek of kitschy sentimentality. It's a tribute to "Last Days'" integrity — however grueling it can be — that the moment comes off as sincere, sweet and sad all at once.