It’s a point of fact that a lot of the new Miles Davis movie is fiction.
Miles Ahead isn’t a biopic. Most of its action centers around two days Davis (Don Cheadle) spends with made-up journalist David Braden (Ewan McGregor), who’s looking to write the famed artist’s “comeback story.” From what we’re to believe, any hijinks the two get up to in this 100-minute buddy flick (see: shootouts, snorting coke and stealing back a session tape) didn’t really happen.
But who cares? Miles Ahead is the smart, irreverent tribute Davis deserves.
“It’s less a Miles biopic,” as McGregor told Rolling Stone in March, “than an attempt to cast Miles in a caper flick that he might like to have been part of.”
That’s not to say you won’t learn a thing about Davis here. Memoir is interspersed throughout. He falls in love with the very real dancer Frances Taylor, and then they fall apart. We get a look at his recording session with arranger Gil Evans for “Gone” – a punchy track with one of the best trumpet solos to date. There’s moments for the jazz geeks, too: I couldn’t but laugh out loud when Davis gets on a hotshot trumpeter about playing B flat over a D minor 9 chord.
This is a piece of cinema that stands on the shoulders of music movies like that one about singer Bobby Darin, Beyond the Sea. (Kevin Spacey, for his part, sang through a pile of Darin repertoire to play the iconic crooner. Just take a minute to imagine Frank Underwood singing those sweet lyrics: Somewhere, beyond the sea, somewhere, waiting for me…)
Both films rely on artsy, sometimes jarring transitions to move between memory and the present moment. It’s hard to coax a sense of coherence from the first, say, 10 minutes of Miles Ahead – but after that, the film takes off, screaming down city streets in Davis’ luxury Jaguar.
Actor-director Don Cheadle seems to get at the heart of who Davis was, painting the raw musician with effort and intention. (Fun fact: Cheadle reportedly learned to play the trumpet to prep for the film and to “try to understand” Davis, as he told ABC News.) While the two-day timeline is compact, nothing feels glossed over. We see Davis, a virtuoso musician who even draws inspiration from composers like Frederic Chopin. We glimpse a demanding – and ultimately violent – lover. And we find him to be a forgiving soul.
A few years ago, at a time when I was gigging around town as a jazz pianist with some buddies, I went to a show called The Miles Davis Experience. It was an impressionistic spectacle that chronicled a certain period of Davis’ life with solid music and collages of color.
Miles Ahead is just another impressionistic tribute.
It doesn’t follow rules, makes you bust up laughing and leaves you feeling as if any kind of straight-laced biopic would have been, to the complex artist, reprehensible.
This story was written by Jonathan Bach.