Birth of the cruel

The Miles Davis moment continues. The jazz (sorry, social music) trumpet legend and subject of director, star, and co-writer Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead already showed up for a sort of preview appearance in last week’s jazz trumpet biopic, Born to be Blue. That one is about Chet Baker, but even so, Davis is the film’s guiding star: Baker is crushed by his idol’s casual dismissal, and spends the entire film trying for a second chance to impress the master. Now it’s Davis’s turn in the spotlight, which creates a mostly unflattering glare even as it illuminates his genius. (Not that there’s much agony about it: even though lost love helps to give the story shape, it’s clear throughout that Davis wanted to be a great artist much more than he wanted to be a good man.)

Both films find their subjects in the midst of career lows: Baker is in prison for drugs; Davis is largely entombed in his apartment, paralyzed by his own legacy (plus a number of chemicals). It’s been five years since he’s released anything, and his label is impatient to hear the results of a recent session tape. Even his fans have lost the thread: a Davis tribute on the radio rhapsodizes over his early work, but our hero knows the past is dead, man. Cheadle renders this late-period Davis as a man who wears his own face like a mask, and usually throws gigantic shades on top to boot. He has to: the eyes are still expressive, betraying the desperate fear behind the big talk and brash action that follow: can I still do this? And that’s the big difference between Born to be Blue and Miles Ahead: Baker wants to get back to where he was, while Davis wants to find his way forward.

What shakes him out of his seeming stupor — and provides the film with its genre-busting car chase of an opening — is the arrival of a would-be journalist (Ewan MacGregor, suitably unkempt) who is eager to pen a profile and call it a comeback, despite the protestations of his subject. Their first stop is Columbia records, and suddenly it’s clear why the creative juices won’t run: in one room, you’ve got an exec who wants to cash in before you crap out, a lawyer who reminds you that what you make is not your own, a heavy who’s ready to enforce his master’s will, a promoter who wants to use you as a stepping stone, and a young prodigy who knows who you are but also knows he’s next, not to mention the vampiric scribbler with whom you walked in. Is it any wonder Davis pulls a gun?

That meeting sets the story in motion: it’s less about art and creativity, and more about everything that gets in the way of that (mostly commerce). The biopic part shows up in frequent flashbacks, triggered by this or that moment in the quasi-comedic goings on. It’s a smart move on Cheadle’s part, and it produces a number of startling, seemingly revelatory transitions between present and past. By the end, it doesn’t matter much what sort of music the man is making; what matters is that he makes it.