Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2005): iconoclastic or iconic version of the musician biopic?

Abstract

The meeting between Gus Van Sant, an independent film director, and Kurt Cobain, epitome of the grunge movement, could only lead to a marginal biopic. In 2005, Gus Van Sant decided to portray Kurt Cobain in a distorted and implicit biopic. He revisits the biopic genre, offering a portrait that is both iconoclastic and iconophile. Generically speaking, the filmmaker multiplies the variations in order to avoid the pitfall of academism. In this way, Last Days is a work that denies any generic archetype. But through his choices of direction and his narrative decisions, Gus Van Sant honours his outside of the norm subject. More than in many other musician biopics, the form and the subject are in perfect harmony, Gus Van Sant offering to discover an iconophile portrait of Kurt Cobain, a star out of the world.