Walk like a junkie

Michael Pitt is a little unhappy that he isn't more mainstream. It doesn't bother him much. But it would be nice. It's not that Pitt, who stars in Last Days (a gentle dirge of a movie directed by Gus Van Sant that is loosely based on the final days of the rock star Kurt Cobain's life), wishes he could join the popular part of popular culture. It's that he wishes the mainstream would join him.

"I just do movies I like," he says, sitting somewhat uncomfortably in a suite in a New York hotel the production company paid for so he could talk about Last Days. "I mean, I do movies I would want to go see." And it just so happens that the movies that Pitt, who is 24, would want to see don't happen to be the movies millions of movie-goers also want to see.

It might be nice if everyone preferred Bertolucci to Bruckheimer, or Kinski to Cruise, but the fact that they don't won't make Pitt stray from what he likes, he says. He's been offered big, blockbuster projects that he rejected, he admits ("It's probably not cool to tell you which ones"), and he doesn't claim to be beyond sometimes imagining how much easier life might be with the enormous sums of money he's passed up ("Is it tempting? Are you kidding?"). But for the moment, he just wants enough to pay his rent and make sure his band, Pagoda - a rock'n'roll group with some debt to bands like Sonic Youth and the Pixies - has the equipment it needs. "So why would I do that sort of stuff?"

Last Days, which follows a Cobain-like figure wandering around a large house and wooded property on the loose legs of an aimless drug stupor until he is ready to die, is certainly a film that exists outside the blockbuster arena. Nothing much happens. There is hardly any dialogue - Pitt's lines are almost entirely unintelligible mutterings - and Van Sant dedicates himself doggedly to the long take, holding his shots focused on static scenes for long stretches, with the camera, motionless, devoted to almost nothing at all. For a culture addicted to car crashes, explosions, and an editing style invented by rock video directors, it's the sort of movie that would be sure to baffle and bore any number of regular moviegoers expecting what Hollywood has taught them to expect.

But nothing succeeds like failure in modern culture, if you wait long enough. And Kurt Cobain's career with the early 1990s rock band Nirvana is as good an example as any. The story of 20th-century American society is in large part the story of the outside infiltrating the inside - or, perhaps, the mainstream appropriating its opposites, forcing subcultures and alternative movements and rebels to assimilate, making them safe and comfortable and palatable for the population to consume. Whatever is strange is gradually accepted, or twisted, until it seems not only to fit into, but also to become essential, to the great mixed-up myth of America.

Cobain's outsider status - critics saw him as the crown prince of a rock movement reacting against corporatised art and superficial culture - melted at an astonishing rate into massive wealth and fame, a revolution abused by its own success. Nirvana became not any sort of guerrilla reaction against the mainstream, but part of a new regime. And the leader of a successful revolution is expected to provide a new religion. In life, he was unhappily elected high priest; with his 1994 suicide, he graduated to martyr messiah.

"You know, people want someone to tell them the answer," says Pitt. "They want a friend, or a teacher, or a parent - but above all I guess they just want to know. And the truth is you can't tell them, and that's a hard thing to deal with. And it's easy to get wrapped up in the idea that this person knows - that he will tell me what I need to know, what I need to live - because he means a lot to me."

Music has traditionally been a better breeding ground for the outside to enter the inside than film. The angry gods of film are far fewer than their musical counterparts, the cinematic outsiders finding less success: it is a medium, perhaps, that takes longer for the outside to penetrate the inside. But Pitt has refused to do much with the potential for massive commercial success, his first major role in the industry notwithstanding: a recurring guest star role on the teen-angstathon Dawson's Creek, when he was 16. It was his first break. "Well - it was my first job, you know," he says. "I think in some ways you learn more from the things you don't like than the things you do. What you want, and what you don't want."

From Dawson's Creek, he was cast in a small role in Van Sant's Finding Forrester, which starred Sean Connery as misanthropic writer and is one of Van Sant's more commercially-friendly films, and then as a rising rock star in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of a transsexual singer from Berlin and her young lover (Pitt) who steals her songs and rises to fame without her. Pitt didn't move into the big budget movies, despite the attention Hedwig brought him: he tended to stick with directors he admired, like Larry Clark (Bully), Barbet Schroeder (Murder By Numbers), and Bernardo Bertolucci (The Dreamers).

"Movie stars get paid these ridiculous amounts of money - I don't know if they deserve it," says Pitt. "But I think what they're really getting paid for is not the work but all the other stuff." That is, the talk shows, the press junkets, and the paparazzi. It's not, to say the least, something he wants. "I can go anywhere," he said. "Sometimes someone recognises me, but not very often. I don't think I'd handle it very well, frankly. I think it's lucky that I don't have to. I'm pretty sure I'd react badly."

In Last Days, playing a miserable man mistaken for a messiah felt like a particular sort of task, something that required something a little different. "It's always a responsibility. When I'm going to do a role I try to bleed it." But he was also aware of the sort of reactions he could expect from audiences. "There's people who think Brando was a god, there's people who think that Kurt Cobain was a god, there's people who think Rimbaud was a god," he says. "I thought I had a responsibility to be pure, to not do things that would feed that sort of thinking. But at the same time, you know, my biggest fear is that people are going to take the movie as fact. We're not trying to say that it's fact." The film, he says, is simply "an ode to Kurt," an artwork that offers no explanation for legend, but rather a portrait of a man in pain whose life has been a long process of preparing to end himself. "I played it as if he knew that was his fate, from when he was a little kid," says Pitt. "As though he was constantly remembering his death." He didn't work too hard to copy Cobain: "Well, I played a junkie. People have said to me: 'My God, your walk in the movie is just like Kurt's.' But I was just trying to walk like a junkie."

The first page of Cobain's diaries, published in 2002, has two entries: the first is just one sentence, "Don't read my diary when I'm gone," and then, just under that, "OK, I'm going to work now, when you wake up this morning, please read my diary. Look through my things, and figure me out." No small amount of cultural augury has been devoted to looking through his things and trying to figure him out. Modern music and film are art forms devoted to voices and faces that their consumers don't have to imagine, so it is perhaps a natural human inclination to spend great energy imagining what is behind those voices and faces. But, as John Updike once wrote: "Celebrity is the mask that eats the face." In Last Days, Pitt's face is notably absent, always covered by a blond mop of hair or oversized sunglasses in the few direct shots of him: it is a face eaten away to nothing, or maybe a face that simply refuses to show itself. Likewise, this is a movie that is not so much an assault on the majority culture as a refusal to take part in it. "I guess you could say it's sort of a passive attack on the mainstream," says Pitt.

If celebrity is the mask that eats the face, then surely the mainstream is the kingdom that eats its own revolutions. And for those artists, like Van Sant or Pitt, who wish to avoid being eaten, it is perhaps best not to attack the kingdom but to stay as far away from it as possible.
Last Days is released on September 2.

• Film
• Kurt Cobain
• features

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