Quasi-biopic that asks the question, Why should the artist prize the love of a good woman when heroin will do just fine? One possible answer: if the woman is good enough, she won’t land you in an Italian prison the way drugs might. She might even give you the strength to straighten up and fly right. And so: we open with West Coast jazz legend Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke, muted and moody) lying on a hard stone floor, reaching out for a tarantula that has just crawled from the bell of his horn. (Symbolism!) But then: salvation? A proposed biopic — starring the man himself — gets him sprung, and though it flounders, it allows Baker to meet Jane (Carmen Ejogo, winsome and self-possessed), the actress playing his wife. Their first scene together is Baker’s debut at Birdland, where he is cast down from the mountaintop by a dismissive Miles Davis, who tells him to do some living and then come back. At first, living mostly means dying: drugs, the aforementioned prison, and getting his teeth knocked out. But Jane perseveres, and so does her man. Hawke’s performance ably conveys the painful, humble work of climbing back up the mountain, and writer-director Robert Budreau mostly sticks to beauty over prettiness, and the nature of practice over the magic of talent. Only the ending is strange: narratively forced and yet seemingly inevitable. (2016) — Matthew Lickona