Cobain Lives

Michael Pitt didn't really "get" Kurt Cobain the first time around, which is fair enough, since he was only 13 when the Nirvana frontman shot himself.

More to the point, Nirvana were too famous to be cool at the tough New Jersey school that Pitt attended. "They were very popular and on TV all the time, so I didn't really give them a chance," he says. "In my school, everyone listened to R&B and rap music. Then one day I went into school and saw all these rappers dressed in black. I said, 'What's going on?' And they said, 'Kurt Cobain died.' That really struck me, you know? But I was more into Sonic Youth."

Music is still important to the 24-year-old actor, who has his own band, Pagoda, and recorded the version of Hey Joe used in Bertolucci's The Dreamers (in which he stars).

He rediscovered Cobain last year when playing Blake in Last Days, Gus Van Sant's archly non-specific "meditation on the inner turmoil that engulfs a brilliant but troubled musician in his final hours".

Nobody so much as whispers the word "Cobain" in the film, which an opening caption carefully describes as "a work of fiction". Emphatically absent, even in lookalike form, is Courtney Love, doubtless on legal grounds.

Still, there's not much doubt who Pitt's character is meant to be. He wears the trademark oval, plasticframed sunglasses (although they're yellow: Cobain's were red); has the same floppy hair, grungy clothes and scrappy beard.

"Even if you used the real name or the music, it wouldn't be what it was, would it?" comments the actor. "It's a movie. This way, you're able to look at it more as a human being than as one particular individual. In a weird kind of way, it's more respectful to the individual. If it was the other way, it would be like The Doors." He has a point: anything would be better than Oliver Stone's bloated biopic.

Since he first began to attract attention in Dawson's Creek, Pitt has carefully constructed the persona of a mumbling, politely noncommunicative stoner who forgets to show up for photo shoots and looks like he would rather be anywhere than in an interview. But I detect a sharp focus and certain amount of ambition lurking behind that goofy grin.

He doesn't seem particularly interested in fame - "you reap what you sow", he says - but, in his five years of acting he has already built an impressive career. He has veered back and forth between the mainstream (Dawson's Creek, Murder by Numbers, The Village) and the indie (Larry Clark's Bully, sex-change drama Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Dreamers, and now Last Days), and has done so in a way that suggests that a De Niro-like fall from grace - or even a Montgomery Clift-style burn-out - are unlikely to happen to him.

His latest ambition is to direct. "A movie is the director," he says, insistently. "An actor can make it better. But if the director is bad, the movie is bad. When I'm picking something, I focus mostly on the types of directors I want to work with."