Miles Ahead, film review: Portrait of a jazz legend — warts and all

Don Cheadle, as Miles Davis, is magnificent in every scene

The film-makers got the idea for the title from Miles Davis himself. In 1957 the legendary trumpeter, never over-encumbered by modesty, put out an album called Miles Ahead. Actor Don Cheadle, the star, director and co-writer of this ambitious biopic, doesn’t want to play nicely. He wants to play.

A TV interview between a staid journalist (Ewan McGregor) and our hero bookends the movie. The rasping musician, asked to explain why he stopped making music in the late Seventies, holds his instrument aloft and, boom, we’re plunged into 1979 where his cocaine-gobbling, gun-toting self is haunted by memories of his long-suffering first wife, Frances (Emayatzy Corinealdi), and becomes entangled with a gonzo hack (McGregor, again).

The hack accidentally allows a potentially valuable tape made by Davis to fall into the hands of a weaselly music producer (Michael Stuhlbarg), thus prompting several car chases in and around New York.

You don’t have to be a jazz buff to guess that the “missing tape” lacks a toehold in reality. The narrative, in other words, is a meta-fiction spun by Davis to satisfy himself and/or to bamboozle his white interrogator. He’s surely flattering the journo by casting him in the buddy-movie-cum-blaxploitation high jinx. Davis, like crafty Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects or crazed Riggan in Birdman, has a perspective that needs to be handled with caution.

Cheadle, 51, is magnificent in every scene, convincing as a strung-out 53-year-old but also as a spruce, thirtysomething Don Juan. It probably helps that Davis, even when young, rarely looked it. He had a breezily beautiful face complicated by Gollum eyes. Cheadle captures the contradictions without even seeming to try (an accomplished musician, he’s also a dab hand at miming).

A shame his direction and writing aren’t as inspired. It’s an intriguing concept, that Davis views intimates as foils. Yet it often makes for thin drama because only Davis is three-dimensional. Corinealdi and McGregor aren’t stretched and the actors playing Davis’s musical peers fare even worse. On the few occasions that we see the great man’s bandmates they barely utter a peep. Davis’s lofty pronouncements, meanwhile, are never questioned. He declares he hates the word “jazz”. He prefers the term “social music”. You hope (in vain) that someone will say: “Jeez, what a surprise that never took off.”

Cert 15, 100 mins

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