“Who do you like better me or Miles Davis,” trumpeter Chet Baker, played by Ethan Hawke, asks a fan at the start of “Born to Be Blue.”
Baker had a clean, round sound that was part of a West Coast cool jazz scene that harder edged cats like Davis dismissed.
The pair was psychic and musical rivals, with Baker hungry for Miles’ respect.
Another difference was their drug of choice.
For Miles it was coke. “Miles Ahead,” the nervy, jagged biopic starring and directed by Don Cheadle, opening next week, is made in its hopped up image.
For Baker it was smack and “Born to Be Blue” has the slow, self-destructive downward trajectory of a junkie’s nod.
We meet him at his nadir, in jail in a foreign country.
But the worst is yet to come.
He is bailed out by a producer making a film about his life in which he stars – black and white sequences from it serve as flashbacks – and while filming he is beaten by drug dealers who knock out his teeth, leaving him unable to blow.
What follows is a long physical rehabilitation and professional redemption, that Hawke makes by turns sympathetic and tragic. The heart of the film is his relationship with the one woman, played by Carmen Ejogo, he doesn’t disappoint. Until he does.
We spend the film wondering which will happen first; the other shoe to drop or his haunting, wounded performance – with Hawke doing the vocals – of “My Funny Valentine.” Spoiler alert: It’s the latter.
But the former isn’t far behind. A coda reminds us Baker died mysteriously in 1988 after falling out of a window at an Amsterdam hotel. (After the beating he sang more in the twilight of his career to rest his mouth.)
Hawke – sallow cheeked with an equine face and an upsweep of hair higher than meringue on a Norske Nook cream pie – gives a languid physical approximation of a junkie who “never hurt anyone but himself.”
Writer director Robert Budreau, who made a short film about Baker in 2009, is an effective visualist but “Blue” feels retold rather than reinterpreted. It is missing both the sense of discovery and of loss.
(The real story can be found in the 1988 documentary )
**1/2 Two and one half stars
With Ethan Hawke, Carmen Ejogo, Kevin Hanchard, Callum Keith Rennie, Stephen McHattie.
Produced by Robert Budreau, Leonard Falinger, Jake Seal, Jennifer Jonas.
Written and directed by Robert Budreau.
Rated R; drug use, language, sex.
Approximate running time: 97 minutes.
Tags: Born To Be Blue, Chet Baker, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Miles Davis Posted by