I completely (and respecfully) disagree with my co-worker Charles Mudede’s review this week giving the Kurt Cobain-inspired Gus Van Sant film Last Days a positive review. Instead I’d like to warn people that the waste-of-your-money movie is not only a long, slow test of patience, but also that it’s a frustratingly lame cliché of the rock star as the drug addict—which, even given that Cobain was both a rock star and an addict brings no new life or originality to that concept or to the end of Cobain’s life.

Keep in mind I actually liked the other two sloth-paced Van Sant films. Gerry and Elephant managed to create suspense even in a suspended period of time and with very little action. In Gerry, Van Sant made the fear of getting truly lost (and contemplating your own mortality) increasingly more real, and with Elephant he managed to tell short stories of high school life within a tragic tale of school violence. Last Days, however, uses Kurt Cobain's image to prop up a whole lotta nothing. While you cared about the characters in Van Sant's other films to some degree, there's nothing to care about with the Kurt character, other than the fact that you know who he is by association. He's high the whole time, his housemates are often high (and little more than props with speaking parts) and the few insightful or funny moments (involving a Yellow Pages salesman or cameos from Kim Gordon and Harmony Korine) don't make up for the fact that the film tells the familiar story of a drug addict using a familiar face without making the effort to present us with anything visionary, unusual, or even vital to the story of this one time music legend. Artsy for artsy sake (and reimagining the famous for ticket sales' sake) does not a great movie make.