Miles Ahead

As some­one who start­ed out on the band­stand with Char­lie Park­er, and closed his career record­ing with Prince, jazz trum­pet leg­end Miles Davis had plen­ty to look back on but very lit­tle inter­est in so doing. A guy who nev­er played a great­est-hits set, musi­cal­ly he was always in the now, an ethos mak­ing him fun­da­men­tal­ly unsuit­ed to the usu­al A‑to‑Z Hol­ly­wood biopic.

Thank­ful­ly, Don Cheadle’s long-ges­tat­ing, inde­pen­dent­ly-financed film por­trait has no inten­tion of going down that route, and in Chea­dle him­self has pret­ty much the only actor alive who might car­ry out the pierc­ing intel­li­gence and bad-ass mys­tique Davis him­self pro­ject­ed from every record sleeve and live appear­ance. Any­one who’s ever seen him on stage (and your review­er num­bers among them, Glas­gow 1990) will attest to being in the pres­ence of, quite sim­ply, a man apart.

Cheadle’s movie cap­tures at least some of that. His per­for­mance gets the raspy voice, the stare, and the super­pimp wardrobe, yet is rich enough to sug­gest vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty behind the jazz glad­i­a­tor pose. It’s cer­tain­ly a smart choice to sit­u­ate the bulk of the action in Miles’ late ​’70s Howard Hugh­es peri­od, when he’d stopped play­ing and holed up in his New York lair.

This gives the nar­ra­tive legit­i­mate rein to show its sub­ject assailed by past achieve­ments and lost love, while con­sumed by fears for the future, phys­i­cal infir­mi­ty and a vora­cious coke habit. Work out what brought him back from the abyss, and maybe you have the key to Miles Davis – a man, after all, whose trade­mark mut­ed trum­pet sound has giv­en gen­er­a­tions of lis­ten­ers access to an all-envelop­ing melan­choly out­lin­ing the very con­tours of the soul itself.

Davis afi­ciona­dos will con­firm that Chea­dle knows his stuff. The music choic­es are con­nois­seur smart, and the flash­backs, while offer­ing fair­ly con­ven­tion­al insights into his cur­dled rela­tion­ship with wife Frances Tay­lor (a strong show­ing from Emay­atzy Corineal­di) and the racism of an ear­li­er era, are def­i­nite­ly con­vinc­ing. Which is more than you can say for the ​’70s nub of the piece, which sets out to probe Davis’ dark night of the soul, only to deliv­er – of all things! – an odd-cou­ple bud­dy com­e­dy pair­ing him with Ewan McGregor’s func­tion­al scoop-hunt­ing music journo.

Cer­tain­ly, Chea­dle eschews the famil­iar biopic moves, and hence touch­es on Davis’ cre­ative cri­sis, the moment when he’d seem­ing­ly run out of juice. How­ev­er, the knock­about mis­ad­ven­tures, involv­ing a stolen mas­ter tape (like Miles only had one copy) and the quest to get high (like Miles Davis can’t score his own coke), real­ly don’t play at all, and McGregor’s be-my-friend role comes across as a whol­ly unnec­es­sary sop to a main­stream white audience.

Mer­ci­ful­ly, Chea­dle ral­lies the troops for a funky musi­cal coda, bring­ing togeth­er Davis’ key for­mer band­mates Her­bie Han­cock and Wayne Short­er, with today’s hip­ster con­tin­gent (Bird­man drum­mer Anto­nio Sanchez, bass queen Esper­an­za Spald­ing). This upbeat exit strat­e­gy caps a movie that’s often as sharp as you’d hope, yet whose weird­ly off-key cen­tre stands out like an unchar­ac­ter­is­tic cracked note in an oth­er­wise con­trolled, expres­sive solo.