Don Cheadle (2015)

My first visit to the City Screen Picturehouse – and the first film I’ve seen for decades in York, where it all began …

The traditional shape of the performing artist biopic – a linear storyline, perhaps in the form of a series of flashbacks, as the central character regretfully reviews their life and reflects on the price of fame – has recently given way to other narrative structures.  Most of Get on Up jumped back and forth between James Brown’s childhood, his breakthrough in the music business and his mid-career crises.  Love and Mercy alternated descriptions of Brian Wilson’s developing musical art and mental illness in the 1960s with the story of his first, painful steps towards salvation twenty years later.  Miles Ahead is about the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis:  a straightforward narrative might have seemed a particularly inappropriate, square contradiction of his free-flowing music.  The film moves between two parts of Davis’s biography.   One is the period just before he began a new lease of life as a performer and recording artist, following a five-year silence that had started in the mid-1970s.  The other is his earlier, failed marriage to Frances Taylor.  The spine of the chronologically later part of the story is supplied by a piece of fiction:  the arrival in Davis’s life of Dave Braden, a Rolling Stone journalist commissioned by Columbia Records to write a piece about him.

Miles Ahead is clearly a labour of love for Don Cheadle, who produced, directed (for the first time), co-wrote and stars as Miles Davis.  Cheadle is a good actor:  the mixture of vulnerability and intransigence in his face are a persistent reminder of that in his interpretation of Davis but the hoarse, angry whisper in which he speaks sounds oddly put on.  There is, in spite of the movie’s distinctive surface, something generic about its protagonist – at least there is if (like me) you know little about Miles Davis and so can’t rely on prior knowledge to give substance to what’s on the screen.  The generic feel may be partly the result of the screenplay’s concentration on two bits of Davis’s life only:  cherchez-la-femme heartache and precarious comeback are such familiar  biopic themes.  Besides, Cheadle and his co-writer Steven Baigelman (who also worked on the script for Get on Up) don’t reveal many new things about the central character as the film goes on.  As a lover and husband, Davis is possessive, chauvinist, unfaithful and occasionally violent.  He demands that Frances (Emayatzy Corinealdi) give up her successful career as a dancer to be a wife but, once she’s done so, he continues to sleep around.  You’re relieved for her sake when she ends the marriage.   In the 1970s story, Davis is addled by standard issue drink and drugs – and there’s little that Ewan McGregor can do with the weakly written role of the fatuous journalist.

The visually explosive side of the film caused me to look away several times.  Perhaps Cheadle means to create a correspondence between his film’s imagery and Davis’s music but the kinetic results are mostly car chases and punch-ups.  The supporting cast includes Michael Stuhlbarg and, as a young musician, Keith Stanfield.  He is one of the best things in Miles Ahead, just as he was in Short Term 12 and Straight Outta Compton.

23 April 2016