At the Last Days screening I attended, some twenty-odd-year-olds who believe Nirvana, particularly its doomed charismatic leader-singer-songwriter, among the most important musicmakers of the last quarter-century, found the movie slow and no more than average for their purposes. Without that theoretically built-in audience, this interesting effort will find it tough sledding at the box-office.

It cannot be surprising, however, that Gus Van Sant's newest  release would seem uneasy disappointment to the grunge generation. Unlike the scandal surrounding Kurt Cobain's life and death and the continuing, very public derangement of his widow, this film is all interior; that is, within the director’s “elliptical style,” it treats of possibly only a few hours, and, as argued below, nothing is action, for all takes place within the incoherent, drug-addled mind of mumbling rock star Blake (Michael Pitt, who also composed two of the ten songs, plus two video clips, and one of which he sings).

Conveying the evergreen Pacific Northwest coast associated with Nirvana and Van Sant, though filmed at Castle Rock aka Osborne Castle in Garrison, New York, the film opens with a disheveled, scraggly bearded blond stumbling along through autumn woods, stripping to wade across a creek below a waterfall, sitting at a nighttime campfire, revealing a plastic hospital ID bracelet, and shouting a few words from “Home on the Range.”

Looking for a home, indeed he is, and in the first of the director’s trademark abrupt cuts, it is daylight, filled with the harsh background noises that run throughout -- trains, planes, shuffling or clumping footwear, autos distant or near, slapping handshakes, and unidentifiable mechanical things -- as the young man reaches a beautiful but decaying stone-and-wood-paneling mansion.

The page is taken from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which, underlined by the imbedded ballad “The Haunted Palace,” the edifice with “vacant eye-like windows,” the generations of family, the sole surviving Roderick and that male’s very head, are identical and all teeter on the edge of demon-haunted madness, ruin and death. Blake settles in the French-doored greenhouse, with excursions into the main building or -- by the slippery slope rather than stone steps -- down to the river, while mind takes him unwillingly to scenes out of the fairly recent past, from all of which he is aloof, an observer even when a participant.

Carried over from Elephant in this disjointed, sometimes circular time scheme, is the device of returning to the same event but from a different viewpoint which explains the first time around, as when, dressed in a woman’s full slip and hunting boots, a stupefied Blake falls across an opened door, later photographed from his perspective inside the room. Similar, too, is the use of actors’ Christian names for those of the characters they play, imaginatively -- no claim is made factually -- modeled on the band’s members, their lady friends, recording executives, hangers-on.

The house and grounds are empty, and, bedeviled by madness and a sense of failure as a father and more, the musician has fled rehab and come “home” to die. Screeching cars pull in and out, disgorge or pick up people. Some may be real during these days or seconds at the end of his tether--the detective (Ricky Jay) seeking him with guide and driver Donovan (Ryan Orion); a concerned record company representative (Kim Gordon); certainly the police and medics. Some of them would be deadpan hilarious were it not for what we know -- Yellow Pages salesman Thadeus Thomas (Thadeus A. Thomas) and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recruiters plastic-booted Elder Friberg # 1 and Elder Friberg # 2 (Adam Friberg, Andy Friberg).

And, in grungy woodsy parallel to the reality-hallucination Notting Hill of Roeg’s Performance -- “the only performance that makes it, all the way, is one that achieves madness” --most people are stick figures within the musician’s reeling psyche. Unanswered phone voices (one of them the director’s) seek consideration, commitment, cash, as do drummer Scott (Scott Green) and zonked, Buddy Holly-bespectacled bass player Luke (Lukas Haas, who wrote and performed one of the songs), who cavort with Asia (Asia Argento) and Nicole (Nicole Vicius) and, for an uncalled-for moment, with each other.

The house, and thus the mind, is a contrast of elegant furnishings and peeling rot. The heard melodies are not sweet, the half-unheard ones even less so, as sound jars sensibilities. Shouldering a hunting rifle, in assorted ill-matched getups, Blake wanders the corridors of what is left of consciousness.

For this subconscious visual and aural experiment, Van Sant did not rely on specific research or second-hand stories. He had met Kurt Cobain only once, and they had spoken a single time by telephone, so what is here is imagined -- Cobain played left-handed, Blake righty -- perhaps incorporating “the hugest thing ever,” the death six months earlier of the director’s close friend River Phoenix.

A naked soul’s stairway to heaven is counterbalanced by ambulance attendants’ grim slip, so one wonders if the tortured, terribly alone spirit does rest in peace in Nirvanic oblivion. More successfully than in other recent attempts, Van Sant finds organic fusion between the method and the tale, the way it is done and what is told. Though sales are not likely to be heartening, Last Days is adventurous filmmaking. 

(Released by New Line Features and rated "R" for language and some sexual content.)