It’s been only a matter of weeks since the release of “I Saw
the Light,” a film that once again demonstrated the creaky limitations of the
biopic template, and we’ve already got another tale of tortured musical genius
on our hands with “Miles Ahead.” In the film, Don Cheadle creates a
fascinating, if not wholly successful biopic of jazz legend Miles Davis.
A passion
project for Cheadle, the actor directs, produces, co-writes (with Steven Baigelman, who received a story credit for another rule-breaking
biopic, “Get on Up”) and stars in the film. Thankfully, with his first feature
as director, Cheadle does everything he can to buck the pattern of the stale
biopics that came before, and creates a free-form narrative which feels true to
the spirit of both the man and his music.
Jumping
around in chronology, “Miles Ahead” splits its time between two major periods
in Davis’s life. The first picks up in 1979, when he begins making new music
after a long, self-imposed hiatus. He’s a drug-addled hermit when a Rolling
Stone journalist, Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), knocks on his door. Eager to
capture Davis’s comeback story, the writer plies him with cocaine when the
musician proves resistant to spilling his guts.
Early in the
interview, Braden insists that he’s not interested in the standard subject of
such profiles, asking Davis to skip over the usual anecdotes about drugs,
women, and the source of his creativity. Cheadle mostly adopts a similar
attitude toward the material, taking his story in unexpected directions. It’s
during this section that the film gradually morphs into a buddy crime caper,
with the pair attempting to wrest Davis’s stolen session tapes from the
clutches of the unscrupulous manager (an underutilized Michael Stuhlbarg) of an up-and-coming trumpeter (Lakeith Lee Stanfield). By the time the duo are getting
into car chases and having shootouts with one of the manager’s hired guns, you
start to wonder how exactly we got to that point.
The film’s
other narrative takes place 20 years earlier, chronicling the musician’s
tempestuous romance with Frances Taylor (the wonderful Emayatzy Corinealdi),
the dancer who would eventually become his wife. While this section treads into
more conventional territory, the performances help alleviate some of that sense
of familiarity.
Cheadle is
electric as Davis, slipping into the larger than life personality with a cool
swagger that comes through even when he’s at his most desperate. The actor
gives a predictably strong, charismatic performance. Cheadle also demonstrates
considerable talent behind the camera, but despite his best efforts, the genre
gets the better of him; something about documenting creative genius seems to
befuddle even the most talented of filmmakers.
The
bifurcated structure ultimately doesn’t leave us with a complete portrait of
the man. Admittedly, this may be because when faced with the prospect of
turning in a traditional biopic, Cheadle instead opted to leapfrog over the
clichรฉs by simply inventing a more interesting story to cover; the majority of
the storyline with Braden (including Braden himself) is entirely made up for
the movie.
Just as the
artist bristles when the journalist refers to the music he makes as “jazz” —
Davis insists that the writer call it “social music” — so too does Cheadle work
to avoid letting his film fall into those easily defined categories. He draws a
clear influence from blaxploitation films of the 1970’s,
and there’s more than a little “Super Fly” to those crime sequences. And while
the details may not be accurate, it does make for a wildly entertaining ride,
and honestly that counts for a lot.
In the end,
“Miles Ahead” is all the more fascinating for its flaws, and Cheadle’s
unconventional choices hint that he has instincts that could make for an
interesting career behind the camera. He adds stylistic flourishes that give
the film a propulsive, unpredictable energy that’s as bold and dynamic as
Davis’s music, finding ways to cleverly transition between the timeframes, like
when the back of an elevator pushes open to reveal itself as a doorway to the
past, and one exhilarating sequence in which the two timelines suddenly bleed
together at a boxing match.
Editors John
Axelrad and Kayla Emter are
key in creating the film’s jazzy, improvisatory feel. As a filmmaker, you
can sense Cheadle’s passion for the material behind every frame, even when he
sacrifices authenticity for sheer entertainment value. The film doesn’t quite
come together, but when films like “I Saw the Light” are still being released,
Cheadle deserves credit for taking a chance.
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2016.
