It perhaps helped, that I was a 'grunger' myself and the biggest Kurt Cobain fanboy on the face of the earth during my early teen years, and the rock star that indie darling Michael Pitt satisfyingly embodies here, obviously sketches out the "last days" of the Nirvana frontman. After "Elephant", a film about the massacre in an American high school, Van Sant deals once more with another moment of crisis of the youth culture of the 90s, once more triggered by a senseless act of violence. In Kurt's (Pardon me for using the forename, but I feel very close to him although I never actually was) suicide note, he tells that the success of his band and his role as the "voice of his generation", for him, the depressive grunge poet, was a burden that suffered him to death. In the public dialogue of the music business in 1994, he was considered to be the first MTV-victim: the last true rock'n'roll rebel who slipped into something he couldn't cope with.
It's brilliant how Van Sant's achieves an exterior shallowness in the shots and images we see on screen to the contrary odds of the inner life of the main protagonist, a restless wanderer on an everlasting search for oneself and the final resignation "I lost something on the way I am today." The film is very meditative and naturalistic; a minimalist drama which locates for the most part in a roomy building and depicts the events which might have caused to the suicide of the musician. It has some intensely spellbinding musical moments, kind of an abstract form of the style of Nirvana's music and the grunge movement per se, when Blake/Pitt murmurs for almost 5 minutes a acoustic ballad and finally furiously tears the strings of his guitar. Or there's the sequence when Blake talks on the telephone with a member of his band who wants to argue him into making another tour. This conversation, like so much more in the film, goes off into nothingness - at some point, Blake doffs the handset and leaves his pal talking into the void until the scene interrupts. Another great moment in the film is when we see Blake from a distance in his rehearsal room through a window, while the camera almost imperceptibly backs up and one by one releases the view at the luxurious country house, walking around and operating several instruments. The chords of an electric guitar crescendo to a voluminous drone sound and with every instrument Blake plays, the intensity increases while the camera slowly moves away from the house. This gives a feeling as if Van Sant withdraws from his protagonist, with the awareness that also the camera can not get to truth of Blake's/Kurt's story and that certain secrets should rather left to be untouched. It's also remarkable that Van Sant avoids any direct reference to drug use, but there are hidden innuendos such as the Velvet Underground song Venus in Furs we hear from a scratched record: "I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for thousand years". This extolled numbness of the body has also befallen Blake whereas the association of the record and the heroine needle is kind of a 'witty' pun.
At the end, when Blake leaves his body (in admittedly too much pathos) and goes up the Stairway of Heaven, you just seem to be relieved that his misery of mental and physical exhaustion and mundane loneliness finally found an end and you have to agree with Kurt Cobain's famous line: "It's better to burn out than to fade away."
It's brilliant how Van Sant's achieves an exterior shallowness in the shots and images we see on screen to the contrary odds of the inner life of the main protagonist, a restless wanderer on an everlasting search for oneself and the final resignation "I lost something on the way I am today." The film is very meditative and naturalistic; a minimalist drama which locates for the most part in a roomy building and depicts the events which might have caused to the suicide of the musician. It has some intensely spellbinding musical moments, kind of an abstract form of the style of Nirvana's music and the grunge movement per se, when Blake/Pitt murmurs for almost 5 minutes a acoustic ballad and finally furiously tears the strings of his guitar. Or there's the sequence when Blake talks on the telephone with a member of his band who wants to argue him into making another tour. This conversation, like so much more in the film, goes off into nothingness - at some point, Blake doffs the handset and leaves his pal talking into the void until the scene interrupts. Another great moment in the film is when we see Blake from a distance in his rehearsal room through a window, while the camera almost imperceptibly backs up and one by one releases the view at the luxurious country house, walking around and operating several instruments. The chords of an electric guitar crescendo to a voluminous drone sound and with every instrument Blake plays, the intensity increases while the camera slowly moves away from the house. This gives a feeling as if Van Sant withdraws from his protagonist, with the awareness that also the camera can not get to truth of Blake's/Kurt's story and that certain secrets should rather left to be untouched. It's also remarkable that Van Sant avoids any direct reference to drug use, but there are hidden innuendos such as the Velvet Underground song Venus in Furs we hear from a scratched record: "I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for thousand years". This extolled numbness of the body has also befallen Blake whereas the association of the record and the heroine needle is kind of a 'witty' pun.
At the end, when Blake leaves his body (in admittedly too much pathos) and goes up the Stairway of Heaven, you just seem to be relieved that his misery of mental and physical exhaustion and mundane loneliness finally found an end and you have to agree with Kurt Cobain's famous line: "It's better to burn out than to fade away."