Ex utero Smells like Kurt Cobain’s spirit BY PETER KEOUGH
	Last Days Written + directed by Gus Van Sant | With Michael Pitt + Lukas Haas + Asia Argento + Scott Green + Nicole Vicius + Ricky Jay + Kim Gordon + Ryan Orion + Harmony Korine | A Picturehouse Films release | 97 minutes HARVARD SQUARE + EMBASSY

Maybe it wasn’t the heroin, the fame, the despair, the stomach pains, the self-loathing, or rock and roll. Maybe it was the house that did in Kurt Cobain. After years of living in cars, crash pads, hotel rooms, and, as he claimed in "Something in the Way," under a bridge, maybe he couldn’t hack having his own roof over his head.

Certainly the grubby, rolling manse in Gus Van Sant’s meditation on the lost period before Cobain’s suicide plays the role of an antagonist. As in Van Sant’s two previous films about doomed, wandering youth — Elephant, in which teenage outcasts go up against a Columbine-like high school, and Gerry, in which a pair of knuckleheads get the short end of Death Valley — setting determines fate. Those experiments bewildered and alienated many viewers with their minimal realistic style. This one probably won’t make any converts, but it does return to the idea of cinema as an art that touches on reality and the soul. Last Days celebrates the intransigence of place as it mourns the evanescence of the spirit.

The spirit takes the form of Blake (Michael Pitt), Van Sant according Cobain the name of a more fortunate Romantic poet. Blake arrives from nowhere, rehab probably, muttering, stoned, and dressed in pajama bottoms with a hospital ID band around his wrist. He stumbles through a wilderness that seems an outtake from Gerry before arriving at a big turn-of-the-century pile with impressive stonework exteriors and a little neglected greenhouse in the yard. Inside are falling plaster, secondhand furniture. and murky landscape paintings. No doubt it’s all a metaphor.

Blake’s not alone: a quartet of half-gassed hangers-on (Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green, Nicole Vicius) loiter about, and the phone rings incessantly. A Yellow Pages salesman and a pair of Mormons ring the doorbell. But he’s seldom acknowledged and mostly avoided, and when he’s pursued, say by a PI (Ricky Jay) hired by "Blackie" (a disembodied fill-in for Courtney Love), he’s never found. He’s the ghost of his own house, whether dining on Cocoa Krispies or Kraft Dinners, passing out while wearing a slip in front of an MTV broadcast of Boyz II Men’s "Bended Knee," or caressing sleeping visitors with the muzzle of a shotgun. "You can leave," a record executive (Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth) tells him, offering salvation. But he can’t. In one stunning sequence, a layered fugue of guitar chords, drums, and howls uncoils while the camera remains frozen on a window of the house. All that moves are the reflections of leaves on the glass and the dim form of Blake as he passes from instrument to instrument.

The place might be inescapable, but the time spent there is fluid. Not long into Last Days you realize that, like Elephant and Gerry, it’s not chronological. Van Sant has cut the narration into strips and pasted them together with repetitions, sometimes from different points of view. Like the camera, which keeps getting drawn back to the house of doom, the editing keeps returning to some moment of truth.

Maybe it’s the shotgun to the head. But there are other epiphanies. Last Days updates the 1970 Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg film Performance (1970), in which Mick Jagger plays another housebound musician. The mushrooms in that film have been exchanged for heroin, and there’s no gangster or Jorge Luis Borges, but the outcome is much the same. As in Performance, the epiphanies in Last Days are musical. No Nirvana songs are heard, but Blake at one point emerges from a narcotic haze to perform a number written by Pitt, and though the latter’s no Cobain, it will do. Blake sings, "It’s a long, lonely journey from death to birth." Viewers will agree, and some will find it worth the trip.