"4 - 44 Last Day on Earth," With Willem Dafoe - NYTimes.com "Live every day as if it were your last" is a piece of corny wisdom I never quite understood until Abel Ferrara's new film explored an obvious corollary: Your last day - or, as it happens, the whole planet's last day - will be just like every other one. Mr. Ferrara makes this point with ingenuity and characteristic thrift by using found news footage to provide images of apocalypse. Crowds gather in St. Peter's Square; candlelight processions wind through the streets of unidentified cities. These evocations of global disaster are part of the background: atmospheric touches in an eccentric and moving portrait of souls in extremis. "4:44 Last Day on Earth," Mr. Ferrara's 20th feature, is not another colossal, special-effects-laden end-times Hollywood spectacle. Instead, like Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," it offers an intimately scaled view of the destruction of the world, with an emphasis on how it all feels to a Bohemian couple living on Mr. Ferrara's beloved Lower East Side of Manhattan. "Why even bother?" says Skye (Shanyn Leigh) to her lover, Cisco (Willem Dafoe), as she watches him shave. "I do it for you" is his sweet reply, but her question is absurd in its own way. Why is she working so hard to complete one last painting? Why does she keep changing her clothes? But then again, what else should she be doing? Given the intolerable and unique horror of the circumstances, she and Cisco seem to manage pretty well. They make love, order Chinese takeout and occasionally let their dread and anguish get the better of them. Cisco, who is much older than Skye and has a nearly grown daughter, has one last conversation with her (via Skype) and one last screaming, futile argument with his former wife. Skye says goodbye to her mother (Anita Pallenberg). Cisco, a drug addict who has been clean for more than two years, thinks about getting high and wanders over to a friend's apartment to test his resolve. The people in "4:44 Last Day on Earth" sometimes behave as if they had all the time in the world, and the film, which runs a scant 85 minutes, feels longer than that. This may be because Mr. Ferrara wants to explore the ways time can stretch out or stand still in anticipation of a terrible event and also to show that such an event, even if it is happening everywhere and to everybody, is nonetheless highly subjective. The cause of the calamity is an environmental breakdown enabled by the human failure to do anything about climate change. Or perhaps the hole in the ozone layer; the science is a bit vague. But the timing of the big finish (referred to in the film's title) is clear, and though there is an occasional flicker of doubt that it will actually happen, all of the public and private voices of reason and faith seem to agree that there is no way out. For solace, Cisco turns to the videotaped wisdom of Al Gore, the Dalai Lama and other sages. Skye immerses herself in her art and wraps herself in a series of lovely, vintage-looking frocks. Mr. Ferrara observes them serenely and allows the audience to feel curiously flattered to share the human race's terminal hours with such cool, sexy, good-looking specimens. "4:44" shares an elegiac mood with Mr. Ferrara's earlier film "Go Go Tales," in which Mr. Dafoe played the owner of a fading strip club. These movies present a somewhat chastened, older-and-wiser side of a wild, often chaotic talent, but the stubborn, lower-depths romanticism that colors Cisco and Skye's world has always been essential to Mr. Ferrara's work. Esteemed by many critics, revered in Europe and still perhaps best known in this country for his crime films "King of New York" (1990) and "Bad Lieutenant" (1992), Mr. Ferrara remains something of a marginal figure in American cinema. For cultural and commercial reasons too complicated to explore here, his louche, outlaw sensibility seems to be more in tune with a particular strain of American literature than with the native film tradition, which has tolerated its share of mavericks but has rarely made room for authentic gutter poets. Though he has the visual instincts of a born filmmaker, Mr. Ferrara may be more at home alongside writers like Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr., Charles Bukowski and the other hard-bitten, openhearted bards of macho excess, pulp eroticism and existential defeat. Like much of their writing, Mr. Ferrara's movies - even a comparatively sober and quiet one, like "4:44" - are acts of defiance and affronts to conventional wisdom while at the same time thoroughly and disarmingly sincere, even to the point of sentimentality. It is certainly possible to sneer at both the histrionics and the downtown deadpan that Ms. Leigh and Mr. Dafoe display and to raise an eyebrow at the hazy spiritual aura that Mr. Ferrara's camera casts over them. But to take easy recourse in scorn or disbelief would be to miss the beauty of what he does with that camera and the grace with which he imagines a strange, terrible and sublimely ordinary series of moments. 4:44 Last Day on Earth Written and directed by Abel Ferrara; director of photography, Ken Kelsch; edited by Anthony Redman; music by Francis Kuipers; production design by Frank DeCurtis; costumes by Moira Shaughnessy; produced by Juan de Dios Larraín, Pablo Larraín, Peter Danner, Brahim Chioua and Vincent Maraval; released by IFC Films. In Manhattan at the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. WITH: Willem Dafoe (Cisco), Shanyn Leigh (Skye), Natasha Lyonne (Tina), Paul Hipp (Noah), Dierdra McDowell (Cisco's ex), Triana Jackson (J J), Trung Nguyen (Li) and Anita Pallenberg (Diana).