Nick Schager@nschager
Don Cheadle flails about trying to channel the spirit of late jazz-trumpeting legend Miles Davis in “Miles Ahead,” a biopic that rejects typical genre conventions to the point of chasing itself down lame, tangential paths. A passion project for its star, who also directed, co-wrote and co-produced the feature, this portrait aims for insight by striving to match its own form to that of its subject’s music, whose inspired improvisational tunes repeatedly defined the course of modern jazz. A wild, and wildly uneven, free-form investigation of Davis’ turbulent personal and professional life that’s bolstered by an outsized lead performance, the film — premiering as the closing-night selection of this year’s New York Film Festival — is set to open next year through Sony Classics, though its all-over-the-place style will temper mainstream theatrical interest.
Eschewing the cause-and-effect pop-psychologizing of “Ray” and “Walk the Line” for the more experimental, impressionistic approach of last year’s James Brown pic “Get On Up” (or Clint Eastwood’s “Bird”), Cheadle’s maiden directorial effort doesn’t bother with Davis’ upbringing in St. Louis, nor his early days breaking into the New York jazz scene. Rather, it opens with a quote, and then blink-and-you’ll-miss-it footage of Davis in the studio, before settling in with the artist as he gives an interview to reporter Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), during which he immediately admonishes the journalist to ditch his “corny” Walter Cronkite shtick and “come with some attitude.”
Wearing giant sunglasses and one of his many flamboyant open-collared shirts, his hair in a frizzy afro and his mouth constantly pulling on a cigarette, Cheadle’s Davis has attitude to spare. So, too, does “Miles Ahead,” which shortly thereafter abruptly bang-cuts to a frenetic car chase in which Davis leaps from a vehicle amid gunfire, and then to the trumpeter in his New York apartment at some ill-defined period in the ’70s. It’s there that Davis has reclusively retreated for what would become a dark stretch of medical problems, drug use and creative inertia that nearly derailed his career and life.
How Davis came to be in this sorry Howard Hughes-likes state is left frustratingly unexplained here. Instead, scored to the jazzman’s moody, eclectic, virtuosic songs, and visualized via clunky bobbing-and-weaving camerawork (an apparent tip of the cap to Davis’ fondness for pugilist Jack Johnson), Cheadle’s film goes about attuning itself to Davis’ wavelength, which — blurred by pain from a nagging hip, and clouded by habitual cocaine use — is all over the place. That’s true even before he’s approached at home by Braden, a flouncy-haired, corduroy-jacket-wearing stranger who claims to be a Rolling Stone reporter assigned (by the magazine, and by Davis’ label, Columbia) to pen a “comeback” article about the star’s return to the spotlight — an encore Davis himself hasn’t yet scheduled.
The duo’s introductory fisticuffs set the stage for the ensuing action, which finds Davis and Braden pairing up to confront the musician’s Columbia bosses for royalty money. That showdown culminates with Davis shooting at a shady A&R man and sneering at a young trumpeter (Lakeith Lee Stanfield) whose producer, Harper (Michael Stuhlbarg), wants to help Davis rediscover his former glory. It’s amid this confrontation’s threats and insults that the narrative’s reveals its nominal MacGuffin: a new, completed session tape that Davis prizes even more dearly than his drugs, and which everyone else is intent on acquiring for profit-driven reasons.
read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/4kkHukVJZUGxEHdLYmzPKw
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