Born to Be Blue

Jazz trum­peter Chet Bak­er is a tricky sub­ject for a movie, which is prob­a­bly why it’s take so long for this one to arrive. That’s because there are, essen­tial­ly, two Chet Bak­ers: the clean 1950s ver­sion, whose mat­inée idol looks and androg­y­nous singing voice some­how exem­pli­fied care­free Cal­i­for­nia cool; then the hag­gard wraith-like crea­ture who dragged his junkie ass around Europe from nee­dle to gig in the years before 1988’s fatal fall from an Ams­ter­dam hotel win­dow. Right to the end, his play­ing on a good night was tru­ly heart­break­ing on bal­lads, expos­ing a deep well of loss and long­ing, yet just as one can bare­ly look upon this walk­ing ghost with­out recall­ing his youth­ful beau­ty, some­how it’s hard now to lis­ten to the sun­lit ear­ly Chet with­out being aware of the shad­owy path that await­ed him.

All of which is an over-extend­ed pre­am­ble to com­mend French-Cana­di­an writer-direc­tor Robert Budreau for his judi­cious deci­sion to set his film at the piv­otal moment between these two equal­ly icon­ic incar­na­tions of Mr Chet. The action revolves around an actu­al inci­dent in San Fran­cis­co in 1966 when Bak­er was attacked and had his teeth kicked in, a poten­tial­ly career-end­ing cri­sis. Could he learn to play with den­tures? Would his vocals ever be the same? We know the answer, of course, but as in all the best sport­ing come­back nar­ra­tives, the res­o­lu­tion is nev­er a fore­gone con­clu­sion. Ethan Hawke, more­over, is spot-on cast­ing in the cen­tral role, since his own boy­ish prime is not so far behind him while he’s now get­ting slight­ly frayed and inter­est­ing. We cer­tain­ly buy him as a poten­tial­ly washed-up hot­shot who still has enough allure left to have the female co-star (Car­men Ejo­go) of an abortive movie biopic falling right into his arms.

It will not be imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous to many view­ers that the afore­men­tioned biopic or indeed Ejogo’s roman­tic foil nev­er actu­al­ly exist­ed (though her per­for­mance is strong enough to make her seem pret­ty real). And if you com­pare the rest of Budreau’s sto­ry to, for instance, James Gavin’s thor­ough but gru­elling­ly depress­ing biog­ra­phy Deep in a Dream, you’ll get the pic­ture that dra­mat­ic licence has been lib­er­al­ly applied else­where, how­ev­er plau­si­ble on-screen events might appear. What mat­ters most though, is that the film gets Chet. It gets his vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty born of dis­af­fect­ed par­ents, it gets that gnaw­ing sense of musi­cal infe­ri­or­i­ty which allowed Miles Davis’s neg­a­tive com­ments to prey on his mind, it gets the dilem­ma of a hero­in-fuelled con­fi­dence which helped him play like a dream even at the cost of cumu­la­tive self-destruction.

For all those rea­sons, we can per­haps over­look Budreau’s ungain­ly attempts at jazz-noir cool (for that you need Bruce Weber’s mourn­ful late-peri­od Chet doc Lets Get Lost), and the slight­ly schemat­ic way in which the dan­gling issue of addic­tion is pre­sent­ed. Instead, lets be grate­ful for a music biopic which takes you to the heart of a jazz icon’s deep­est, dark­est impuls­es. And in Hawke’s empa­thet­ic yet unvar­nished per­for­mance, which con­vinc­ing­ly sells the trum­pet play­ing (though that’s not Bak­er we’re hear­ing) and finds a con­spir­a­to­r­i­al inti­ma­cy in vocal num­bers where time stands still, we’re treat­ed to a dis­play of off-hand vir­tu­os­i­ty which is some­how very, very Chet.