Gus van Sant returns to the style of his last film, Elephant, in this improvised meditation on the last days of Kurt Cobain but to greatly reduced effect. Where the former film gave us a set of characters, protagonists and victims of the Columbine high-school massacre and suggested how it might have happened, this just has a muttering, comatose rock star almost incapable of speech tracked by Van Sant's relentless Steadicam in an aimless last act: he's presented as a near-ghost already, barely aware of his surroundings.

Cobain's career as leader of the seminal rock band of his time, Nirvana, and a songwriter of beautiful if doomy melodies and savage, headfilling noise is full of interest but concentrating on his demise seems strangely pointless - there's no duller company than an out-of-it junkie and while Van Sant once gave us real insight into addicts' lives in Drugstore Cowboy and the memorable My Own Private Idaho, also with a narcoleptic lead character, this adds nothing to how you would imagine the set-up - despair and dislocation do not make a great movie without a plot or a point. It's a rambling, shambling film and there's nothing lead actor Michael Pitt as Blake (the film admits only that it is "inspired by the last days of Kurt Cobain, but is a work of fiction") can do to make this burnt-out shell of a man interesting.