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Miles Ahead - A Maybe For Jazz Fans?
Miles Ahead is not a conventional linear biopic. Instead, it leaps back and forth between several time periods in the life of this amazing jazz innovator. The real Miles Davis was a a seemingly inscrutable character, obviously musically brilliant but with a very disorderly personality. His damaged vocal chords reduced speech to a whisper and he suffered from a number of chemical addictions. He was hard to work with, and often was disdainful of his audience. Fortunately, he mainly let his music speak for him, being one of the great jazz innovators and an unforgettable trumpet player.
Miles Ahead focuses mainly on the silent period of the late 70’s, when he burned out and stopped performing altogether. I don’t know a lot about this period or Davis’s personal life, but from what I can find on the web, it seems as though this movie is a gathering of incidents and characters, into a fictionalized narrative. As such, it’s not as much of a biography as it is a fiction in which Miles Davis is a character. The movie was written by Don Cheadle and Steven Baigelman and directed by Cheadle. Cheadle also stars as Davis.
The movie begins when Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor) barges into Davis’s home, claiming to be a Rolling Stone reporter looking for a big story about Davis’s absence from the music world and his messy personal life. Brill seems to be slinging as much BS as Davis, who initially kicks him out of the house, but in a sort of twisted buddy-movie way the two of them end up going on a caper. Columbia records wants Davis back working, making records. A gangster-like character has acquired a tape of some preliminary work Davis did in his basement studio. Miles and Brill go on a mad quest to recover the tape, complete with a car chase, guns, a Miles imitator and some tough guys. Davis has a strange, one sided relationship with his wife in which she gives up her career as a dancer in order to live in Miles’s house, suffer physical abuse but still be loyal to him.
If all of this sounds non-linear and episodic, it is. Miles Ahead sacrifices linear plot development for a quick-cut, flash forward - flash back sort of story telling that gives us pieces of his past, suit-wearing jazz club days, intercut with his disorderly state in 1980. In between, there are brief cuts of his music, but unfortunately (for me at least), music seems almost peripheral to the story. If this were any other fictional action movie, that would not bother me, but as a guy who loves Davis’s old jazz and who knew that he was a sketchy character in some ways, I really would have preferred to see a story that focused on what he did well, which was his music. He was not good at being a husband, a gangster and nobody’s good at being a drug user, but the real Miles was amazing as a musician. That seems to be mainly lost in this film, sacrificed to the parts of Miles that I didn’t really need to know and fictionalizing them at that. We know that he could play the trumpet, but we don’t know why he was great.
All that said, the film did keep my interest, from beginning up to end. Cheadle, the actor, is excellent at channeling Miles Davis as a movie character. Nobody has been able to make a film about Davis before and this one sorta works, although in a strange way. Miles Ahead is Cheadle’s first feature length project and somehow he managed to juggle 3 balls at once, as script writer, star and director. I’m not sure just how he did that, but (ignoring my reservations about plot choices for the moment) Cheadle did manage to keep all those juggler’s balls in the air. The frantic, back and forth cutting worked well and the action never lagged.
As for the plot, I’d like to see Cheadle come back, mimic Davis again, but the next time, focus on his music. Davis was a brilliant player and innovator. He had a messy life, not unlike a lot of famous musicians, but if I had the choice of reliving Miles Davis as a musician or as a bad actor in an action movie, I’d definitely stick with the music. Somewhere, I read that several people had tried to make a Miles Davis movie in the past, but failed. This one did make it into the theaters and I don’t have any reason to think that Cheadle was not in awe of the musician, but I do wish he had made better choices for the plot line. If the movie was to be a biopic, it could have been done without all of the fictionalized plot twists in the life of a real person.
Miles Ahead is not a conventional linear biopic. Instead, it leaps back and forth between several time periods in the life of this amazing jazz innovator. The real Miles Davis was a a seemingly inscrutable character, obviously musically brilliant but with a very disorderly personality. His damaged vocal chords reduced speech to a whisper and he suffered from a number of chemical addictions. He was hard to work with, and often was disdainful of his audience. Fortunately, he mainly let his music speak for him, being one of the great jazz innovators and an unforgettable trumpet player.
Miles Ahead focuses mainly on the silent period of the late 70’s, when he burned out and stopped performing altogether. I don’t know a lot about this period or Davis’s personal life, but from what I can find on the web, it seems as though this movie is a gathering of incidents and characters, into a fictionalized narrative. As such, it’s not as much of a biography as it is a fiction in which Miles Davis is a character. The movie was written by Don Cheadle and Steven Baigelman and directed by Cheadle. Cheadle also stars as Davis.
The movie begins when Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor) barges into Davis’s home, claiming to be a Rolling Stone reporter looking for a big story about Davis’s absence from the music world and his messy personal life. Brill seems to be slinging as much BS as Davis, who initially kicks him out of the house, but in a sort of twisted buddy-movie way the two of them end up going on a caper. Columbia records wants Davis back working, making records. A gangster-like character has acquired a tape of some preliminary work Davis did in his basement studio. Miles and Brill go on a mad quest to recover the tape, complete with a car chase, guns, a Miles imitator and some tough guys. Davis has a strange, one sided relationship with his wife in which she gives up her career as a dancer in order to live in Miles’s house, suffer physical abuse but still be loyal to him.
If all of this sounds non-linear and episodic, it is. Miles Ahead sacrifices linear plot development for a quick-cut, flash forward - flash back sort of story telling that gives us pieces of his past, suit-wearing jazz club days, intercut with his disorderly state in 1980. In between, there are brief cuts of his music, but unfortunately (for me at least), music seems almost peripheral to the story. If this were any other fictional action movie, that would not bother me, but as a guy who loves Davis’s old jazz and who knew that he was a sketchy character in some ways, I really would have preferred to see a story that focused on what he did well, which was his music. He was not good at being a husband, a gangster and nobody’s good at being a drug user, but the real Miles was amazing as a musician. That seems to be mainly lost in this film, sacrificed to the parts of Miles that I didn’t really need to know and fictionalizing them at that. We know that he could play the trumpet, but we don’t know why he was great.
All that said, the film did keep my interest, from beginning up to end. Cheadle, the actor, is excellent at channeling Miles Davis as a movie character. Nobody has been able to make a film about Davis before and this one sorta works, although in a strange way. Miles Ahead is Cheadle’s first feature length project and somehow he managed to juggle 3 balls at once, as script writer, star and director. I’m not sure just how he did that, but (ignoring my reservations about plot choices for the moment) Cheadle did manage to keep all those juggler’s balls in the air. The frantic, back and forth cutting worked well and the action never lagged.
As for the plot, I’d like to see Cheadle come back, mimic Davis again, but the next time, focus on his music. Davis was a brilliant player and innovator. He had a messy life, not unlike a lot of famous musicians, but if I had the choice of reliving Miles Davis as a musician or as a bad actor in an action movie, I’d definitely stick with the music. Somewhere, I read that several people had tried to make a Miles Davis movie in the past, but failed. This one did make it into the theaters and I don’t have any reason to think that Cheadle was not in awe of the musician, but I do wish he had made better choices for the plot line. If the movie was to be a biopic, it could have been done without all of the fictionalized plot twists in the life of a real person.