Film directors have long been mesmerised by the tragic arc of the rock star who dies young. More often that not, it’s the leftfield directors — those who move in the same countercultural circles as their fatally flawed heroes — who feel most compelled to film these shocking stories.

So it is with Last Days, a response to the suicide of Kurt Cobain by Gus Van Sant, one of the kings of American independent cinema. Released this week, Van Sant’s film has not been well received by Keith Cameron, who knew Cobain and offers his view of the Nirvana frontman’s last days below.

Among the other biopics in preparation is a film by Anton Corbijn about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division who killed himself 20 years ago. Kevin Cummins talks about the man he photographed on many occasions. Two tragic bassists, the Beatles’ Stuart Sutcliffe and the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, are already the subject of biopics: Iain Softley’s Backbeat and Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy. We have recollections from Sutcliffe’s sister, Paula, and punk historian Chris Sullivan, who describes his appropriately confrontational introduction to Vicious.

And what about the untold stories? Pete Paphides finishes our special by focusing on a star he knew well whose life is perfect biopic material: Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers. Rest in peace? Think again.

Kurt Cobain

Born Feb 20, 1967.
Died Apr 5, 1994.
On screen in: Gus Van Sant’s Last Days

Keith Cameron recalls his meetings with the Nirvana singer

“On the evening of September 23, 1990, Kurt Cobain sat on the porch of a modest house in a blue-collar American town and offered me an apologetic look. ‘All my life my dream has been to be a big rock star,’ he shrugged. ‘Just may as well abuse it while you can.’

“He laughed as he said these words. He could afford to: at that precise moment, the notion seemed preposterous. His band, Nirvana, drove to gigs in a clapped-out Dodge van and lugged their own equipment. So desperate were Kurt’s economic prospects that a few months earlier he had applied (unsuccessfully) for a job cleaning out dog kennels.

“Nirvana’s album Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous at the top of the US album charts in January 1992. The sheer velocity of their transformation from Seattle nobodies to global superstars overwhelmed them; in particular Cobain, who swiftly became tabloid fodder thanks to a combination of wealth, heroin and his marriage to the singer Courtney Love. For all his palpable charisma, Kurt always struck me as too ambivalent towards humankind to engage happily with the process of celebrity.

“I saw him in July 1992 as he waited for his luggage at Madrid Airport. His dream had come true and he looked dejected. ‘Is there anything about this experience that you’re enjoying?’ I asked. ‘The new Sonic Youth album,’ he said, after a long moment’s thought. ‘It’s the saving grace.’

“Less than two years later, Kurt was dead. In his brief life, Cobain had been riven by internal conflicts, primary among which was his savage desire for the approval of others and an instinctive recoil from the corrosive consequences of that very impulse. He and I became friendly. We met a dozen times between 1989 and 1992, often — but by no means always — in the mediated circumstances of an interview, parting ultimately on bad terms following an article I wrote on the eve of Nirvana’s last UK show, at the Reading Festival in 1992, expressing alarm at the rapidity with which his band’s story was assuming the hallmarks of rock Babylon.

“It’s an issue addressed in Gus Van Sant’s new film Last Days, an allusive longueur ‘inspired by’ the end of Cobain’s life, wherein an artist wanders stoned around his mansion, estranged from the few people who had lent his life some meaning, before finally committing suicide. Transparently a Cobain facsimile, the artist — Blake — is visited by a record executive, portrayed with colossal poignancy by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, who asks him whether he speaks to his daughter and whether he tells her: ‘I’m sorry that I’m a rock’n’roll cliché.’

“I found Last Days upsetting, yet not for the reasons Van Sant presumably intended. As a piece of quasi autobiography masquerading as fiction, Last Days offers little in the way of enlightenment. ‘It’s entertainment,’ says Nirvana’s Dave Grohl. ‘I assume it will all be wrong.’

“The film closes, deplorably, with a re-enactment of the discovery of Kurt’s body, as extrapolated from the infamous photograph depicting the deceased’s partially visible torso glimpsed through the greenhouse door. Van Sant admits he did little-to-no research on his subject — “I felt more comfortable just making it up” — yet for him to abdicate responsibility in the name of art, while doubtless happily reaping the box office rewards, feels queasily opportunistic.

“Quoting Neil Young in what is presumed to be a suicide note, Cobain wrote: ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away.’ Eleven years on, the fire won’t die.”

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