It’s tough to pull off a musical film biography.
For every “Ray,” in which Jamie Foxx captured something essential about Ray Charles, there is a lurching and episodic “I Saw the Light” in which country music legend Hank Williams is played by English actor Tom Hiddleston, who is six years older than Williams was when he died at 29.
The best musical biopics reveal an artist’s life through his or her artistic impulses, as in the Brian Wilson story “Love and Mercy.”
But musical biopics usually focus on personal tragedies since the artists portrayed often have turbulent lives, and because creativity is an interior process that is hard to dramatize.
Two new biopics of jazz legends are made in the image of the people they portray. The style of the films are, to put it bluntly, as different as smack and blow, street names for what were their drugs of choice.
“Born To Be Blue” about the troubled trumpeter Chet Baker played by an appropriately gaunt Ethan Hawke, moves with the lethargic pace of a junkie’s nod. It just left town after a one week booking.
Now playing, however, is “Miles Ahead” in which Don Cheadle – who directs and co-wrote the screenplay – portrays the groundbreaking jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.
It is an abstract work whose central conceit is a little flimsy.
When we meet Davis he is creatively blocked and self medicating. Cocaine his drug of choice makes him twitchy and volatile. The story involves the theft of a recording he made in his home studio and his attempt to recover it with help from a disreputable journalist played by Ewan McGregor.
This never actually happened. But the search for it allows the story to leapfrog in different directions along a path toward his becoming the wasted genius we see here.
There are flashbacks to early performances, a marriage destroyed by his obsessions, infidelities, a degenerative hip disease and fondness for firearms. All these elements unfold like a hallucination as he and the journalist chase his missing recording, which may or may not exist.
“Miles Ahead” is not a triumph, mostly because of this narrative conceit. But it is a success thanks to the raspy-voiced, sunglass-wearing, chain-smoking Cheadle, who wears Miles’ menace and talent like a second skin.
To prepare for the role Cheadle took trumpet lessons for four years and plays a bit in the film. Otherwise the music is provided by the accomplished horn player Keyon Harrold and Davis’ original recordings.
People often say they liked Woody Allen better when he was funny. Miles had a similar problem.
Casual fans associate him with his melodic 1959 masterpiece ‘Kind of Blue.’ But later in his career his work became daringly experimental, as if to challenge and alienate mainstream listeners. The non linear quality of “Miles Ahead” is made in the image of this music. It feels like a personal statement by Cheadle and is both an act of the imagination and a work of art. These are things musical biopics rarely accomplish.
*** Three stars
With Don Cheadle, Emayatzy Corinealdi, Ewan McGregor, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jeffrey Grover, Keith Stanfield.
Produced by Robert Ogden Barnum, Don Cheadle, Pamela Hirsch, Daryl Porter, Daniel Wagner, Vince Wilburn Jr., Lenore Zerman.
Written by Steve Baigelman, Don Cheadle. Directed by Don Cheadle.
Rated R; language, sex, nudity, drug use
Approximate running time: 100 minutes.
Tags: biopic, Don Cheadle, Miles Ahead, Miles Davis Posted by