“If you’re going to tell a story, then come at it with some attitude. Don’t be coy with that shit.”
This is Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) talking to a slippery Rolling Stone hack (Ewan McGregor) in Cheadle's peculiar – though maybe not peculiar enough – biographical sketch of the trumpeter.
We can surely assume that Cheadle is also speaking to himself. He doesn't want to preserve his subject in tasteful aspic as Clint Eastwood did with Charlie Parker in Bird. He certainly doesn't want to employ the dead-brother approach parodied so amusingly in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
Cheadle’s solution has been to incline ever so gently towards the experimental. The film is set at the end of Davis’s period of creative silence in the late 1970s. Part Col Kurtz, part fly Dracula, the musician now lives grumpily in an Upper West Side Xanadu. The action kicks off when an archetypal music journalist named Dave Braden (the frayed corduroy jacket is assumed, not actual) bursts in and pleads for an interview.
Miles initially reacts with characteristic gun-wielding unreason, but is eventually persuaded to accompany Dave on a drive around the city that takes in visits to a drug dealer in Columbia University and – the coincidence is noted – arguments with the intermediate brass at Columbia Records. They want tapes of Miles’s latest recording. He wants some ready cash.
The recordings fall into the wrong hands and the film briefly becomes an unlikely 1970s TV show about a journalist who solves crimes with an ageing trumpeter (complete with the thumping jazz-funk fusion that really did score those shows).
If the Todd Haynes of I'm Not There were behind the camera, then the words "Hack 'n' Hipster" may very well have appeared on the screen. But Cheadle is frustratingly cautious about abandoning himself fully to the avant garde. The film is alive with some lovely moments that point towards half-grasped possibilities.
As the present-day Miles reels about a boxing arena, an earlier incarnation occupies the ring with one of his classic 1950s line-ups. Little scents of the past creep into every contemporaneous scene. But these flourishes are merely decorations on a largely conventional, mostly uninteresting chase yarn.
What is not in doubt is that Don Cheadle really, really wanted to make a Miles Davis film. Though too much of the project plays to bum notes, the actor cannot be faulted on his commitment to the title role. Who would not relish playing Miles? Speaking in that extraordinary threatening whisper, Cheadle gives us a man angrier than a chained hound. Miles Ahead does find time for the notorious incident that saw Davis beaten by a racist cop for daring to smoke a cigarette on 50th Street between sets at Birdland, but the film is otherwise cautious about providing sources for Davis's rage.
Perhaps no easy answer can be given in a film of modest duration. More puzzling is the reluctance to engage with the music. We get a brief glimpse of collaborations with Gil Evans on the album that lends its name to the film. The second great quintet lurks in the corner of a few later scenes. Nobody hitherto unfamiliar with Davis’s sound will be much educated.
The film is, however, at its most problematic when dancing around the issue of Miles’s violence towards women. In a series of flashbacks, we see him romance the dancer Frances Taylor and – after politely demanding that she give up her job – embark on a “turbulent” marriage.
You’ve seen this sort of mutually reprehensible plate-throwing in a dozen Hollywood biopics. In truth, Davis was relentlessly brutal to Taylor. We have his own word for it. “I remember I hit her once when she came home and told me some shit about Quincy Jones being handsome,” Davis wrote. “Every time I hit her, I felt bad because a lot of it really wasn’t her fault.” That’s big of him.
That feels like a variation too far. An interesting folly nonetheless.
