Even as “Batman vs. Superman” neutralizes intelligent thought for the flood of fanboy audiences that bow before its altar, Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke play jazz legends Miles Davis and Chet Baker in two unconventional biopics (“Miles Ahead” and “Born to Be Blue”) that soar high above Hollywood’s unfortunate adolescent mindset.
Don Cheadle’s independently produced labor of love “Miles Ahead” is an exquisitely polished love letter to the iconic genius who revolutionized music five times over during the 20th century. Cheadle spent nearly a decade making a film that has become this year’s best-kept secret.
In “Miles Ahead” sturdily constructed subplots weave between two days during Miles’s ‘70s retirement from music and earlier periods related to his time with Frances Davis, the woman featured on the cover of Davis’s 1961 album “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Hot chemistry boils between Cheadle and Emayatzy Corinealdi, an impossibly beautiful actress who plays Frances with an elegant poise and feminine power that is out of this world.
Where Cheadle’s film is an ambitious embrace of the jazz trumpeter’s music, humor, and imagination, writer/director Robert Budreau “Born to be Blue” is an impressionistic chamber piece made up of composite elements from Baker’s life. Linear facts don’t matter. Both films eschew the traditional cradle-to-grave biopic formula. In so doing the films take audiences through the air that Miles Davis and Chet Baker breathed.
Ethan Hawke certainly has the acting chops to play the legendary jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Even better, Hawke resembles Chet in middle age before the ravages of heroin devastated his iconic good looks. But there’s more to Hawke’s portrayal of Chet Baker than keen acting skills and physical resemblance: demons. The Gen X survivor who caught fire in 1994 with “Reality Bites” has battled plenty of personal sprites, all the while testing the limits of his talents by writing (plays, novels and screenplays), directing, and acting. Always acting. His work here represents his finest performance to date.
Forget about dueling superheroes, “Born to be Blue” and “Miles Ahead” are the real McCoy if you’re out to watch phenomenally gifted men sparring for supremacy on their chosen field of battle. The blood and spit they spill is in the service of a transcendent musical beauty that no comic book creation can imagine.
