20 Years Later, Gus Van Sant’s ‘Last Days’ Still Haunts the Biopic Genre
The biopic has long dominated our culture, with more released each year than the last. They often succumb to typical Hollywood functions, taking place over the subject’s entire life, yet still managing to sanitize the subject’s darkest parts. In refusing to fully engage with the depths of the figures these films examine, the biopic genre acts as a perpetual limbo, keeping its subjects bound to a neat and tidy box that threatens to never be fully examined. Yet some manage to stand out, releasing these figures from their haunting lives by empathetically dissecting them head-on.
Set in and around a desolate stone mansion, Gus Van Sant’s Last Days follows Blake (Michael Pitt), a young musician whose blonde hair and lithe body purposely mirror that of the late Kurt Cobain. More of an experience than an actual film, we watch as Blake treks around the property of his desolate home, evades friends who ask him for money, and contemplates his existence while feverishly playing the guitar. Each scene bleeds into the next, until the film’s moments weave together to create a haunting archive of Blake’s final moments on earth. They seep together like a black sludge, forcing you into a world that is neither bound by reality nor time.
The house he lives in is dilapidated beyond repair, the paint peeling, and the corners riddled with dirt. It’s as if the house represents Blake’s headspace, empty except for the festering deterioration and rot. Van Sant cocoons his protagonist within a confined structure, acting not as a resting place or a studio to make new music, but as a prison that he cannot escape from. Even when Blake ventures outside, he strolls for what feels like hours into the green unknown that surrounds his house. It’s an inescapable site filled with the same visions: green, lush, but uninviting in its vastness.
Like Blake’s brain, which is clearly affected by drugs and mental health issues, the space in which he occupies acts as not only a shield to keep other people out, but a prison that he cannot escape. With each wavering step Blake takes in the film, he careens further into death’s great abyss. The emptiness of his home and the openness of its surrounding forest act as an invitation to succumb to his worst thoughts, which he inevitably does in the film’s final moments.
In the haunted house genre, the protagonist of these films is usually haunted by a ghost, spirit, or demonic entity. These supernatural beings spend the film’s runtime terrorizing the inhabitants of said home, either because they want them to leave or because they want to consume them. Last Days undeniably falls into this genre, but instead of a ghost, Blake is being haunted by himself.
Though most biopics would make Blake’s suffering more apparent (with either scenes of self-harm or explicitly mentioning the word “depression”), Van Sant refuses to explore the consciousness of his protagonist. In never allowing the viewer to understand why Blake is depressed, or why he is living alone in this empty house, the director takes a radical approach that no other exploration of a public figure has. Van Sant lets the film do all the talking. The fly-on-the-wall cinematography feels unnervingly intimate, and the film’s lack of music forces you into Blake’s world.
While Van Sant strays away from giving viewers any answers, he instead captures a slow descent into loneliness and isolation. When your brain is marred by an illness so deeply rooted in your body and soul, normalcy becomes aimless and aimlessness becomes wholly uninteresting. There is no justification for the sadness Blake is dealing with; it is simply a part of him that he can only escape in death. It’s a crucial outlook on mental health, but one that Van Sant adamantly doesn’t shy away from. This is how Blake feels on-screen, and this is how the man he’s inspired by felt in 1994.
Last Days is not afraid to confront its viewers directly with the idea that for some people, death is inescapable. Biopics are often weighed down by a saccharine film placed over the camera’s glass, as if directors are terrified by the ghosts that threaten to seep out from each film reel. Here, this film defies its genre and its audience, making it clear that this is an exploration of someone’s last days on earth, not an exploration of what happened to them or why.
Neither a biography nor a hauntingly exploitative documentary, the film is less about Blake’s death than it is about the haunting mundanity of addiction and depression. There is nothing special about the protagonist; if anything, he is a picture-perfect representation of how depression consumes so many of us. His normalcy paired with each still image–which captures Blake’s body as it nearly levitates through the frame– transforms him into an otherworldly presence.
It’s a shame that after this film, no other director was willing to shoot a biopic in the same way Van Sant did. His refusal to fall victim to the normalcy of the genre allowed him to embalm his film not in sentimentality, but in a brutalness that this genre continues to lack two decades later. There is a reality that is fabricated in books and documentaries on certain subjects’ lives, and then there is what truly happened. Neither Van Sant nor the audience truly knows what happened in the days leading up to April 5th of 1994, but the languidity of Last Days proves that maybe none of that actually matters.
What matters is that at the end of the film, Blake kills himself. When the credits rolled in 2005 and now in 2025, respectively, Kurt Cobain remains deceased. At the end of this fever dream of a film, Van Sant adds a cautionary note: though “inspired” by the last days of Kurt Cobain, the film is “a work of fiction and the characters and events portrayed in the film are also fictional.” Yet, Kurt Cobain’s suffering was so public, so overwhelming, it is impossible to separate him from the ghost we’re forced to bear witness to on screen.
Categorized: Editorials
