REVIEW: 'Miles Ahead,' Don Cheadle's Miles Davis bio-pic

Don Cheadle stars as the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis in the bio-pic Miles Ahead, a film that Cheadle also directed.
Don Cheadle stars as the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis in the bio-pic Miles Ahead, a film that Cheadle also directed.

You don't come at genius straight on. That's stupid, that's wading into the thresher. Will Smith is not Muhammad Ali, he can only mime the butterfly moves, find something in a vocal cadence that evokes the Louisville drawl of the Champ. Maybe you can learn to hold a guitar and a few notes, maybe you can put on a fake nose and a wig, but if you're going to depict real genius you'd better come at it obliquely, more like a poet than a journalist.

That's how Don Cheadle stalks Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, a project he has chased for more than a decade. (The actor even learned to play the trumpet for the film and plays some of the incidental music on the soundtrack; I don't know whether this is made more or less impressive by the knowledge that in high school Cheadle was an alto sax player who idolized Charlie Parker.)

Miles Ahead

87 Cast: Don Cheadle, Ewan McGregor, Emayatzy Corinealdi, Lakeith Lee Stanfield, Michael Stuhlbarg

Director: Don Cheadle

Rating: R, for strong language throughout, drug use, some sexuality/nudity and brief violence

Running time: 100 minutes

As a filmmaker, Cheadle is wily enough to know a straight-line bio-pic wouldn't serve Davis or the audience. Facts are what they are, but you can (usually) find them in the Wikipedia album. To make a movie that captures even a little of the danger and darkness that informs the legend's art, you must dare to take some leaps. You can't worry about chronology or what others will say are the high points -- you start it off with Miles (Cheadle) telling Rolling Stone writer Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor) that "If you're gonna tell a story, come with some attitude" -- then slam-cut into the musician running for his life in the streets of Manhattan, bullets whizzing about him.

Maybe that's a little overmuch, but it sets a tone, doesn't it? We know this isn't going to be a by-the-numbers History Channel book report. You know Cheadle -- who also directed and co-wrote the script -- isn't interested in utilizing any genre conventions. This is an impressionistic, fractured film that won't default to the pop psychology, cause-and-effect tropes common to these sorts of films. Instead of a survey of Davis' life from his St. Louis childhood through his early days in New York and apprenticeship with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, we're confronted early on with a rasping, broken man deserted by his muse, unwilling even to touch a trumpet.

Cheadle's film could be dismissed as speculative -- or fan -- fiction, and it will probably catch flak from those who want to know more about the real Miles Davis and those who have trouble with art-for-art's sake frippery. While the film is nominally set in a single day during Davis' barren late '70s period (sometime after his 1975 retirement) it flashes back to important episodes in the '50s -- his first marriage, his arrest outside of Birdland in 1959 -- yet never explains exactly how the cool, sharply dressed jazz man who made Kind of Blue wound up as the blaxploitation version of Howard Hughes (nor does the film address Miles' comeback in the 1980s).

Miles Ahead is no good if you're looking for the CliffsNotes version of Davis' story, and longtime fans are likely to complain that they don't recognize the Miles on-screen (though Cheadle has crafted a couple of impressive impersonations -- he's fascinating as late-period Davis, and he has the cocksure presence of the ascendant jazz pioneer nailed down). Much of the movie revolves around a plot to steal the master tapes of a session Davis recorded during his fallow period (tapes that are said to exist and have never been released) and while we can appreciate the audacity of Cheadle's vision, it feels a little like he declined to attempt the more difficult, maybe impossible, feat of actually plumbing Davis' mysteries.

There's something deliciously surreal about putting a gun in Davis' hand and having him squeal around with Dave like Starsky & Hutch (or Crockett & Tubbs, since Davis was a guest star on Miami Vice in 1985) but I don't know that it has much to do with Miles Davis. Maybe Cheadle is just acknowledging the folkloric nature of the character -- Miles Davis is like Babe Ruth in that it's possible to believe both of these men exist only as legends.

But if Cheadle hasn't made the definitive cinematic portrait of Davis, he has at least made a very entertaining, outrageous movie. In form, it resembles one of Davis' long, flowing solos -- you might smile at this bit, think another part overblown, and even feel a little bored at times, but on the whole it's a worthwhile excursion.

MovieStyle on 04/22/2016

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