3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, drug use, sexuality and brief violence
By Derrick Bang
After watching I Saw the Light, Miles Ahead and now this — all in the space of 10 days — I’m
starting to wonder if any successful
musicians have happy and stable lives.
 |
| After a day spent working on a movie in which he plays himself, Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke) lays some charm on co-star Jane (Carmen Ejogo), who — despite an earlier insistence that she never dates colleagues — finds herself attracted to him. |
Canadian filmmaker Robert
Budreau’s Born to Be Blue can be
viewed as an expansion of his 2009 6-minute short, The Deaths of Chet Baker. This new drama also is what Budreau terms
an “anti-biopic,” which is to say an unapologetic blend of fact and fiction: a
modicum of the former, plenty of the latter.
In other words, very little here
is true; Budreau’s script improvises upon a few key moments during Baker’s
career, much the way a jazz musician explores and expands upon a familiar tune,
in order to deliver a riff that’s both the same and different.
Going in, then, we must regard Born to Be Blue as a jazz-inflected
fever dream that, in time, will contribute its own layer of myth to what
already has become Baker’s increasingly apocryphal legend. With that
understanding, we can admire star Ethan Hawke’s thoroughly engaging performance
as the troubled musician, whose career endured despite his own best efforts to
destroy it.
Let’s begin with known fact:
Baker was “discovered” by Charlie Parker and Gerry Mulligan in the early 1950s,
and quickly rose to become a seminal figure in the nascent West Coast “cool
jazz” movement. He also became a heroin addict, often pawning his trumpet in
order to purchase the next fix. He wound up in an Italian prison on drug
charges in the early 1960s, and — so the story goes — was approached by
producer Dino de Laurentiis, who suggested that Baker star in a movie as
himself.
That project never got off the
ground, but — as this film opens — Budreau imagines that it did. We meet Baker
(Hawke) as he clumsily maneuvers his way through a club scene fabricated on a
movie stage, building to an emotionally intimate moment with co-star Jane
(Carmen Ejogo). Although a budding actress, Jane is serious about her craft,
and mildly vexed at the notion of working with a guy who doesn’t know the first
thing about acting.
But Chet wins her over. Despite a
personal rule against dating co-stars, Jane falls for him ... just in time to
confront a crisis. Emerging from a bowling alley after a sorta-kinda date, Jane
watches in horror as Chet is beaten by goons associated with a drug dealer to
whom he owes money; they knock out Chet’s front teeth, forever destroying his
ability to perform in the manner that made him famous.
(Baker did lose his teeth during
just such an attack, although whether it was a simple mugging — or indeed a
drug deal gone bad — is a secret he took to the grave. And it happened after a
gig at The Trident, in Sausalito.)
