by SARAH ROWLAND

"Fussamuss... prisoner... shimalemenia... in... my... shudawuda... own... goddafodda... life." This is probably the most coherent sentence that Michael Pitt mutters throughout Last Days, an impressionistic look at Kurt Cobain's final 48 hours on earth. And if your hearing is acute enough to catch the words, "I feel like a prisoner in my own life," then you pretty much have the essence of Gus Van Sant's latest film.

Dedicated to the Nirvana frontman who shot himself in April 1994, and inspired by the death of his friend River Phoenix, who OD-ed just months before Cobain died, the Portland-based director makes no attempts to unlock the mystery surrounding Cobain's suicide. Instead, he just offers a dreamlike glimpse into the mental anguish of a tormented artist being crushed under the pressures of commercial success.

As such, the names have been changed or not used at all - Cobain is now Blake (Pitt) and Supermom, aka Courtney Love, becomes the feared "She" who we never see, but only hear about from Blake's entourage. Dave Grohl and co. have been demoted to faceless, nagging bandmates leaving phone messages about an upcoming tour. We see Francis Bean's baby shoes, but she's only referred to as "the daughter" by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, who plays a record exec who tries in vain to shame Blake into getting help. "Have you apologized to your daughter for being such a rock 'n' roll cliché?" she asks, with a mixture of brittle disgust and maternal concern. (The aging noise diva delivers her few lines with such brutal intensity that we can probably expect to see her start honing in on the kind of wicked witch roles that are offered to Deborah Harry.)

Gordon's character also offers the only concrete clue as to what this movie is about. Otherwise, viewers who were either in a coma during the '90s or not born yet would be completely lost in Van Sant's series of artfully rendered domestic meditations. It's not like the dialogue-free scene where Blake takes a good chunk of screen time to pour some Cocoa Puffs in a bowl really furthers the story along any.

Pitt's hits

With such a scantly worded script, a lot is riding on Pitt's body language and his knack for improvisational mumbling. For instance, in the first 20 long minutes, all we see is the grunge rocker camping by himself in the lush Northwestern woods. Here, Pitt contorts his torso into a knotted junkie body and maintains these mangled manoeuvres as his character frantically fumbles through the foliage, trying unsuccessfully to get lost in the forest - only to end up in the path of an oncoming train.

After this failed attempt to escape his reality, Blake returns to his dilapidated mansion, where most of the movie takes place. Like some sort of a cross-dressing Elmer Fudd ghost haunting his own territory, the armed MIA rock star creeps around in a lacy slip and hunting hat surveying and avoiding not only the plaid-clad hanger-oners (including Asia Argento), who've taken over his home, but also the private eye that has presumably been hired to drag him back to the studio.

Throughout, Pitt - whose greatest contribution to Bertolucci's 2003 erotic drama The Dreamers was showcasing how well-endowed he is - proves that he has more to offer on screen than just his impressive member. But where he really earns his keep is the music. Pitt wrote and performed his own acoustic songs live to tape, and for Nirvana Unplugged knock-offs, they're actually not bad. And thanks to Thurston Moore, who was musical consultant on the set, the rest of the quiet soundtrack is respectfully retro-inspired but not in a distracting grunge-greatest-hits kind of way. This is no Singles after all.

What this is, though, is the most stripped down installment in Van Sant's trilogy of fictional impressions - all born from headlines. The first was 2002's Gerry, a poorly received film about two hitchhikers who head into the desert but only one returns. The second is the critically acclaimed 2003 Elephant, a film loosely based on the Columbine shootings. Like Elephant, he repeats scenes from different perspectives so that storyline information trickles in at an alarmingly slow rate. With that in mind, Last Days is only for viewers patient enough for a truly Van Sant experience, or, as Blake would say, "wellahhh...it's...a... fucanfuc ....acquired... gawdsham .... taste."

Last Days opens Friday, Aug. 5

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