THE most interesting duel of the week is that between two directors whose work is better known — and appreciated — on the art-house circuit than the high street. Both directors have made films that weave intimate fictions around biographical crises: the suicide of a rock star and the fall of a Japanese emperor. What makes them so exceptional, and surprisingly compatible, is how hopelessly detached the heroes are from their cliques and surroundings.

Last Days, Gus Van Sant’s shadowy tribute to Kurt Cobain, is an astonishing piece inspired by the final hours of the lead singer of Nirvana.

Michael Pitt plays a depressed, mumbling rock star called Blake who is tragically out of tune with real life. He rattles around his huge shambolic mansion like a ghost, or blunders through the leafy woods on his estate, hiding from grungy squatters and nasty fair-weather friends who milk him for money and favours. All sense of purpose has been sucked out of him.

I’ve rarely seen such an open-ended and intensely moody picture. As with Van Sant’s 2003 Palme d’Or winner, Elephant, there is precious little glue between the disjointed and achingly long scenes. Various puzzled strangers drop by: a worried record-company executive (Kim Gordon, the bass player in Sonic Youth), a pair of beaming Jehovah’s Witnesses and a Yellow Pages salesman. Harmony Korine and Asia Argento — two left-field directors — pay their dues in fleeting cameos.

Pitt is terrific casting: effortlessly reclusive, fat of face, and miserably sensitive behind his curtain of hair. The camera stalks him like a voyeur. Blake mostly avoids any prolonged or meaningful contact. He mutters polite nothings. We observe him comically trying to make macaroni cheese, and hover in a doorway as he wrings a haunting melody out of an acoustic guitar.

Harris Savides, the cinematographer, paints a mesmerising montage of household damp and forest still-lifes. At one point the camera swings and settles on a lump of verdant foliage for several mystifying minutes. The twilight atmosphere and sense of isolation as darkness surrounds the house is extraordinary, and not a little gripping. The beauty is unexpected. There isn’t a single scene or frame that you could possibly second-guess. The narrative is random and fractured, but the gulf between celebrity and heroin-induced despair can be measured in inches. The will to live is leached out of Blake.

The shotgun suicide in the greenhouse — never explained — occurs off-screen. What this wilfully elusive allegory might actually mean seems infinitely less important than how it looks and feels.

The music is terrific: a splash of Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs, a 16th-century choral work by Janequin, an ambient soundscape composed by Hildegard Westerkamp. It demands to be experienced on the big screen.

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