"Don’t call it jaaaaazz." If Miles Davis, here played with a hoarse, whispery delivery by Don Cheadle, refused to have his style boxed in and labelled, this biopic allows itself a certain structural freedom too.
Picking a particularly fraught twenty-four hours in the musician’s life as the seventies come to a close, with sketches of a backstory dotted throughout, Cheadle's directorial debut (he also wrote the non-factual story with Get On Up scribe Steven Baigelman) certainly plays to its own tune.
While this rambling, ramshackle approach may be in keeping with Davis's spiralling soundscapes, it can lend itself to a frustrating time in trying to understand the man.
Shuffling about in his apartment in the late seventies, a coked up Davis hasn’t released any new music in five years. "Jazz's Howard Hughes" is how writer Dave Brill (McGregor) describes him, who comes knocking on the door pitching a comeback article with the reclusive genius for Rolling Stone. Blagging his way into the interview with the promise of quality cocaine, Brill takes Davis across the city in search for, first, drugs and then an errant reel of new Davis material they suspect gun-toting producer Harper Hamilton (a particularly slimy Stuhlbarg) has stolen.
As they flit about the city getting into scrapes, Cheadle slips in flashbacks to Davis's mid-sixties heyday, the racism he encountered, and his ill-fated romance with dancer Frances (Corineadli). As the marriage hits the rocks, Davis’s increasingly paranoid and violent behaviour goes someway to explain the hermetic lifestyle that brought Brill to knock on his door.
Cheadle works hard to find moments to explore these long flashbacks; as they become more frequent, the first-time director can at times let them dominate the flow, eventually unable to decide which one will drive the narrative. As the climactic showdown with Hamilton nears, Cheadle is cutting back and forth between that timeline and a flashback to a violent domestic episode. If the flashbacks tend to follow music biopic tropes (he has the talent, he loses the talent), the seventies timeline is looser, bopping about the place as rolls into its sequences. A subplot involving Hamilton's heroin-addicted trumpeter shadowing Davis doesn't develop as strongly as it could.
Cheadle tosses himself into the role with abandon, disappearing behind that hushed voice and dark glasses. He doesn't blunt Davis’s rougher edges, playing the anti-social drug addict with as much regret, guilt and anger as he can fit in. Aside from a few comic moments here and there, it’s a joyless affair with its leads being unpleasant company throughout.
Not just another hagiographic biopic then.