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Soon, almost a month will have gone by since Miles Ahead<\/em> was released and I\u2019m still wondering whether it was worth making a movie that conceives of Miles Davis as a hip-limping, gun-toting, coke-snorting, jump-suit-wearing, jheri-curled amalgam of Han Solo and John Shaft.<\/p>\n Part of me wishes this summed up my complicated feelings about Don Cheadle\u2019s dream (in more ways than one) project because I\u2019m aware that what I just wrote seems to embed me among the jazz-snob coterie weighing in with sundry, often incendiary objections. Within that coterie, however, I lean towards those balancing our misgivings with resignation over what it takes these days to make, and sell, a movie. And with resignation comes qualified gratitude that Miles Ahead<\/em> is somehow still making its way through the entertainment-industrial complex with so-far-not-catastrophic box-office returns<\/a> and a mostly positive critical reception.<\/a><\/p>\n Still…<\/p>\n I mean, it\u2019s not as if I could imagine, or even wanted an actual bio-pic with all the decorous solemnity and self-defeating finicky-ness too often accompanying the genre. (Even when such movies are careful with the facts, they still somehow ring false, which means John Ford\u2019s often-regurgitated advice about \u201cprinting the legend\u201d is more pragmatic than anything else.) To the extent that Cheadle\u2019s near-hallucinatory pastiche of Davis\u2019 self-imposed exile from the outside world during the late 1970s departs from this dubious norm, I think the movie is an intriguing heave into the cosmos. Too often, however, the blurriness seems less aesthetic calculation than technical difficulties. Some of the interior scenes are cluttered and awkwardly staged. Plus there\u2019s an overall problem with \u201cflow,\u201d which I\u2019m not using as rappers do, but with respect to transitions between scenes, whether flashbacks or in the movie\u2019s present day. Cheadle, assuming he gets another shot at directing a feature (and I think he should), should acquire greater facility with this craft. But for now, as a filmmaker, he\u2019s a hell of an actor \u2013 which, as you\u2019ve heard, he proves throughout Miles Ahead.<\/em><\/p>\n The greatness of Cheadle\u2019s performance isn\u2019t just in the way he successfully appropriates Davis\u2019 raspy voice, glowering intensity and physical tics. All those things, however impressive, isn\u2019t acting so much as impressionism — which in a movie that leans heavily on impressions would blend with, if not thicken the surrounding goo. It\u2019s Cheadle\u2019s all-or-nothing engagement with Davis\u2019 interior struggles that both evokes and epitomizes the intimacy of Davis\u2019 art \u2013 and the abiding faith we kept in Miles through all his transitions and phases. It\u2019s a performance that is most electrifying at those moments when Cheadle\u2019s Miles is either in repose or contemplation; when he isn\u2019t talking or looking at anything except his horn, which at times seems as unfamiliar or as vaguely threatening to him as the future. The tenderness and vulnerability Cheadle summons in his portrayal doesn\u2019t surprise the already indoctrinated. But they are as immersed in its evocation as those whose first encounter with this mercurial personality may inspire them to probe the real deal\u2019s recorded output.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Certainly, it\u2019s a greater inducement than the woozy exhortation delivered by Dave Braden \u00a0(Ewan MacGregor), the dissolute Rolling Stone \u201cjournalist\u201d apparently coaxed into existence by studio executives who believed even the central presence of a black musical genius couldn\u2019t guarantee a motion picture being made, much less distributed, without a White Guy to ride shotgun. \u201cYou got laid to this man\u2019s music,\u201d Braden scolds a bleary-eyed student drug dealer, \u201cand you don\u2019t even know who he is!\u201d It\u2019s not the first time a finished movie entered the marketplace still selling its premise. But it doesn\u2019t make this boosting any less obnoxious.<\/p>\n MacGregor, to his credit, makes the best out of his otherwise thankless task. But his character is by no means the movie\u2019s biggest problem. That comes during a physical altercation between Miles and his wife Francis Taylor (the stunning Emayatzy Corinealdi) that, as depicted in the movie, seems to have happened because Taylor goaded Davis into throwing the first punch. Whether this is what happened or not, I\u2019m disquieted by the scene\u2019s implication that Davis\u2019 widely authenticated serial abuse of the women in his life was a.) brought upon themselves and b.) a relative anomaly in his behavior. That Miles Davis\u2019 smoldering rage could often explode into violence against women is one of the many difficulties those of us who cherish his art struggle to acknowledge, if not accept. (Cognitive dissonance, folks: never easy and rarely pretty.) Since Cheadle did far more work than I did to realize the vision, I\u2019m going to assume he knows this and, thus, knows what he\u2019s doing here. It still chews at me.<\/p>\n I suppose, though, that part of what makes this Miles Ahead<\/em> a conspicuous product of its subject\u2019s legacy is the way it leaves you at the end: With more questions and implications to sort through than hard resolutions. It\u2019s how Davis left things when he left the planet. It\u2019s how so many of the albums he recorded from the mid-1960s to the bitter end lost listeners who couldn\u2019t keep up with his own inquiries into form and function.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n