Gus Van Sant's well-made Last Days has one insurmountable fault: it feels entirely unnecessary. The main problem is that the director has chosen to evoke the memory of Kurt Cobain so directly that it will be the only way for the vast majority of viewers to approach the film. While Michael Pitt offers a sparse, mumbling performance that captures the depression of the main character, the director is unable to make the character particularly meaningful. In Van Sant's previous film, the award-winning Elephant, he took a real-life event (the Columbine shootings) and set up a fictional account of the incident that would allow people to talk about why it happened. The motivations of school-shooters are rarely fully understood, but Cobain made his troubled inner life crystal clear in the songs he created in the year before his death. Pitt wrote two songs that he performs in the film. They are well done and work both as pieces of music and as glimpses inside the character's soul, but "All Apologies" and "I Hate Myself and Want to Die," did the same things and did them much more memorably. Taken back to back, those songs accomplish everything this film wants to and much more.