The last days in the life of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain are fictionalized in this atmospheric account of the days leading up to his 1994 suicide at age 27. From director Gus Van Sant, following the dogma design of filmmaking that allows for only naturally occurring sounds, the crackling of a lonely fire in the woods sets the tenor for his solitary final days. AWOL from a record session he was to attend and living in a sprawling country house with a few assorted band members and friends, themselves not too far behind "Blake" in their stoned disengagement from the demands of real life, he barely gets it together enough to fix himself some instant macaroni. Blake is motivated enough to duck those who come looking for him but has trouble recalling the skills needed to make a bowl of Cheerios. We see a guy who has called it quits and is just waiting to muster the energy to make a final move.

Slowly moving through several days, Van Sant makes full use of the rambling country home and the little summer house to which Blake retreats to fortify his detachment from any remaining relationships. He’s been pursued for money and favors and has reached a point of welcoming strangers – a yellow page advertising salesman, a pair of Mormon missionaries – over being confronted by those who may make more pressing demands on him.

A visit from a woman, perhaps his mother, making an attempt, one senses not for the first - or the tenth - time, to take him away and get him straight, ends in her wordless departure. He wanders into a former nursery and toys with a forgotten baby shoe. Even without specific knowledge of the events and circumstances of his life, his ties to anything meaningful to him have clearly, and painfully, vanished.

Michael Pitt delivers an eerily credible performance as the Cobain-like Blake, mumbling his way through his final days, talking mostly, and unintelligibly, to himself. We see him full in the face only once, significantly near the end, almost looking like he’s posing for his own obituary photo.

Van Sant’s uncluttered images anticipate Blake’s inevitable descent as he forces our attention on the incongruity of the environment. The scattered pieces of high tech electronic equipment placed among the debris of a disheveled house, clearly without a housekeeper, and the orderly landscape surrounding the house, clearly with a groundskeeper, signal a duality of propose to Blake’s artful dodgings. Van Sant takes us off guard with out-of-sequence repetitions of several shots as if to confirm that even if viewed from another perspective, the picture is still the same. Blake’s drug use and abuse is more alluded to than seen, with just the burned out result visible. The music so central to his being and his fame are in evidence as a phantom presence, as part of the past. How close this vision is to Cobain is perhaps not all that important. Van Sant is primarily interested in a sad observation of the precise end of a shattered young man, and at steeping us in the mood of his lonely end he succeeds, sadly.