20 Fascinating Films About Suicide

By Jesse Gumbarge /

7. Last Days (2005)

The music world was shaken in 1994 when the legendary Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Shortly thereafter, Gus van Sant began to make plans to make a film about it, but this was delayed until nearly a decade later, and the plot was changed so that the film was about a fading rock star €œsimilar to Cobain.€ Here the rock star is named Blake, played by Michael Pitt in one of his earliest roles. Pitt's portrayal of the rock star is superbly realistic; you see him and recognise him as one of those musical geniuses who has faded into obscurity after battles with drugs and a fall from stardom. You€™ve seen people like him before. But their lives, or perhaps more accurately their after-lives, their last days as they sink to the final depths, have never been portrayed with such stunning detail and believability as van Sant does here. Last Days will cast a poetic spell on some viewers and will seem mind-numbingly boring to others. How you'll greet a film with essentially no plot, depends upon your partiality toward experimental cinema and the self-indulgence of a heroin-addicted icon.