Kurt Cobain died proclaiming it was "better to burn out than fade away," but Blake (Michael Pitt), the barely veiled Cobain doppelganger at the center of Gus Van Sant's Last Days, is so faded he's practically transparent. Shuffling around a large, empty house in the Washington woods, surrounded by hangers-on who take notice of him only when they want money or drugs, Blake seems less like a man about to take his own life than one who's already died and is waiting for his body to catch up.

Or perhaps that's getting it the wrong way round. In the movie's opening shot, a blurry Blake scrambles down a distant hillside and fords a stream toward the camera, gradually bringing himself into focus, as if he'd just come back from the other side to explain a few things. But as with Gerry and Elephant, which also clipped their plots from the daily papers, explaining is the last thing on Van Sant's mind. Rating no more than a handful of close-ups, his eyes shaded behind a curtain of dank blond hair, Blake — named for the poet, as a credit for a sound collage called "Doors of Perception" makes clear — is a reluctant oracle at best. Discounting a verse of "Home on the Range," it's 25 minutes before the perpetually mumbling Blake utters an intelligible sentence, and that's to tell a Yellow Pages salesman, "Success is subjective."

In Elephant, whose shifting perspectives added painful layers to quotidian high school encounters, subjectivity was all. But although Last Days recycles Elephant's circular structure, the effect is noticeably different. The repeated moments — Blake fleeing a private investigator (Ricky Jay) who drops in unannounced; Blake's coterie death-dancing to "Venus in Furs" — don't accrue meaning; they just turn in on themselves, suggesting the mindless ritual of drug addiction or the Buddhist hell of eternal return. In the most transfixing shot in a movie full of them, the camera pulls slowly back as Blake makes music with himself, layering loop upon loop and then trying, vainly, to slap a rock drumbeat on top of the whirlpool of noise. (In the credits, the composition is identified as "Fetus.") Leslie Shatz's disorienting sound design extends the amniotic immersion; without regard to the onscreen action, Shatz layers in church bells, ambient noise and, most often, the burbling stream that Blake crossed to join us, and which seems always to be calling him back. Several times, we catch Blake sitting on a lakeside dock, staring out at the water and contemplating what we can only guess.

When he's not munching Cocoa Krispies or preparing instant mac 'n' cheese with a halting clumsiness that suggests Ozzy Osbourne taking out the trash, Blake's somnambulist trance is interrupted by a series of overtly mundane encounters that provide the only real clues to his inner world: the Yellow Pages salesman (Thadeus Thomas), unaware the house has changed hands, pressures Blake to re-up his ad, and so queries his definition of success; Mormon brothers (Adam and Andy Friberg) tell Blake about "the most pure being ever to walk the earth… sent to be sacrificed"; a casual friend (Harmony Korine) accosts him at a warehouse show and offers him a dubious folk remedy for his troubles. Between them and the "friends" who protect Blake's poisonous isolation while pumping him for songwriting tips (Lukas Haas) and jet heaters (Scott Green), the only voice of reason is Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, whose brief, dreamlike intervention concludes with a slamming door and the words, "If you stay here, you're just gonna…"

We know how the story ends, of course: with Blake on his back in a greenhouse, face shot away. Although Last Days elides the moment of death (and thus the question of Who Killed Kurt?), Blake's death seems to break the movie's non-specific spell: Cobain's suicide note is clearly visible in TV coverage of Blake's death, and Van Sant reproduces the much-circulated image of Cobain's lifeless, Converse-clad foot glimpsed through a greenhouse door. But by then, thin slices of objectivity are unlikely to satiate the greater hunger the movie has awakened.

Uncanny as Pitt's resemblance to Cobain is, the actor doesn't attempt to connect with the energy that made Cobain a star (which, after all, is why we're here). Riffing on the return-to-the-womb imagery of Nirvana's last album, In Utero, Pitt, who at one point sings his own "Death to Birth," plays Blake as a human only partly formed. As in The Dreamers, the blank malleability of his features is an invitation to use his face as a screen, but Van Sant seems less aware than Bertolucci of the dangers such an opportunity poses, or at least more willing to cede the responsibility to his audience. Literally and metaphorically denied his voice, Kurt Cobain is nowhere and everywhere in Last Days, a spirit that floats through the movie without ever touching down. Where Elephant's forensic method was motivated by a search for answers that could never be found, Last Days gives up the search altogether, seeing things from the ghost's point of view. If Elephant was an investigation, Last Days is a seance.

Last Days Written and directed by Gus Van Sant A Picturehouse release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse recommended